Wired:

What if an Ethereum owner stored their digital money with a private key—the unguessable, 78-digit string of numbers that protects the currency stashed at a certain address—that had a value of 1?

To Bednarek’s surprise, he found that dead-simple key had in fact once held currency, according to the blockchain that records all Ethereum transactions. But the cash had already been taken out of the Ethereum wallet that used it—almost certainly by a thief who had thought to guess a private key of 1 long before Bednarek had.

And:

That initial discovery piqued Bednarek’s curiosity. So he tried a few more consecutive keys: 2, 3, 4, and then a couple dozen more, all of which had been similarly emptied. So he and his colleagues at the security consultancy Independent Security Evaluators wrote some code, fired up some cloud servers, and tried a few dozen billion more.

Seems such an obvious tack to take. And reinforces my avoidance of blockchain backed currency even when trying to visit bitcoin gambling sites. Perhaps I simply lack the sophistication to travel in such currencies. But when I read stories about people losing their life savings to stolen or misplaced blockchain currency accounts, it just scares me off.

This is a great read.