This is why it's a joke: this page is a generator of keys. Every time you load a new page, it gives you another set of possible keys.

If you look at the top of the page, when it says "Page 1 out of 904625697166532776746648320380374280103671755200316906558262375061821325312", you can get an idea that this is not that useful at all. Clever.

I bet the creator hopes that panic will ensue, and that he/she can buy some extra bitcoins at a lower price. I might buy a few now, shouldn't be a bad idea. :)

But do you think the intersection of Bitcoin investors who actually know what a private key is and people who don't get the joke is big enough for that?

No idea. These things can generate panic. The creator is probably trying to take advantage of human behavior.

Well it might just be working judging from Mt Gox right now.

This is how lazy Haskell programmers solve every problem.

I hope you all get the joke. :-)

Edit: I'm not the creator.

We do, but I guarantee you that some idiot reporter is writing up a story right now about how Bitcoin has been "hacked".

I remember similar stories when someone made a "Windows 7 activation cracker" around the same principle.

You bet! I guess it will be on from those blogs who would have just got listed on Google News or something.

Someone had better explain it plainly in a top comment before the price of bitcoin goes down uncontrollably :-)

Reminds me of the classic "all the ipv4 address in the world - tools for hackers!.rar" joke.

Good job :)

Without the corresponding client, the codes are worthless, and trying to brute force with these as reference would be as useful as brute forcing from scratch?

I don't. Please elaborate?

It's like a "list of all North American phone numbers" that goes:

    000-000-0000
    000-000-0001
    000-000-0002
    000-000-0003
    ...

I figured that was it, but wasn't sure. Thank you.

I just started scraping this site at 100 pages per second. It should be complete in about 2.07896e55 times the age of the universe.

and on page 904625697166532776746648320380374280103671755200316906558262375061821325312 (http://directory.io/9046256971665327767466483203803742801036...) you can still click next

The first address has a balance of 0.01 BTC... how would you be able to use it?

I tried importing the private key on Blockchain.info but it gives an error of "Error importing private key: TypeError: Cannot call method 'toBigInteger' of null". Coinbase import feature also gives an error.

Everybody found this address. It is a private key with the value of 0. You'll never be able to get that 0.01 BTC.

What's the technical reason why this address is unusable? Can it still receive money?

i want to know too... fyi, the second address has 4 btc...

It's kind of like fortune cookies that include winning lottery numbers. The problem is they don't tell you which lottery or which day.

Well this one does. But (to keep within your metaphor) nearly all of them are numbers from either the past or after you will die. And the chances of getting a useful one are smaller than actually playing the lottery.

Now only if someone could build an index of that second column to the first ...

so basically there is no database, this is just a list of all possible combinations generated on the fly. not that funny.

If you could compute at infinite speed and merely needed to store all the possible key pairs in secp256k1, you'd need about 10^59 exabytes of storage.

So let's wait until Google crawl it and then make queries!

10^59 exabytes is more than 10^53 times as much storage as there ever has been manufactured.

It's funny, because there are so many!

Feature request: Search by address.

That would be a good idea. That way, everytime someones enters their key, the app can answer that it is not there, check its presence in the database, then get the money :p

It will never get the entire list anyway...

Clever idea.

Care to open source the generator code?