With his third appearance in less than a month, it appears that johoe, the “friendly” bitcoin hacker responsible for taking funds from blockchain.info customers (only to return them later) has become the latest celebrity to hit the bitcoin world.
Recently, johoe spoke on The Bitcoin Game, episode seven of the radio show “Let’s Talk Bitcoin.” Among the things he discusses are how he got involved with bitcoin and the flaws he’s discovered thus far:
“I watched this problem closely in the last days because there was another application doing similar things. […] Yes, I found a new key a week or something like that. So I made it a habit to look after it every day, and this [one] morning I found these 500 new weak keys, so I knew there was a problem here. […] In this commit, the developer wrote what the problem was […] this was my starting point. […] It was clear that if I know the random numbers, then I could basically generate them myself. […] The main motivation was the technical part.”
A computer science researcher at a German university, johoe has thus far “rescued” approximately $200,000 in bitcoins, including almost $5,500 in the currency from CounterParty earlier this year after their Counterwallet experienced a bug that produced repeating R values.
Despite everything, johoe insists that he did not breach blockchain.info simply to show that there were security holes, although he does enjoy the fandom and attention such thoughts have brought him:
“I like reading these comments about me…”
