What exactly is "privatekeys.pw"?

Question

Today, I stumbled upon this bizarre website: https://privatekeys.pw/

Bitcoin Private Keys Directory

The FAQ makes no sense at all and doesn't explain what it is about whatsoever.

What could they be referring to? Private keys? Are they listing compromised private keys to Bitcoin wallets? Why do that in public? And if so, of course whoever runs that site must've already nabbed any coins from the wallet anyway? So what possible use is that information to the world?

As so often is the case, I have to ask: "What am I missing here?"

Answer 1

The site is a joke, or at best a confusing attempt to educate.

It literally lists all private keys, from low to high, as private keys are just numbers. There are of course way more than can be reasonably computed and stored, so the pages are just generated on the fly. If you ask for private keys starting at number N, it on the fly computes the public keys corresponding to private keys N through N+43, and looks up their balance on public block explorers.

But it doesn't let you search by public key, so it is useless for cracking things. Real private keys are randomly generated, and just scrolling through a near-infinite list of pages to look for a given public keys won't give you anything.

Answer 2

If you look at the features of the site, there are a few notable ones:

First, it allows the conversion of private key formats on a web interface, between decimal, hex, WIF, old Electrum seeds, mini, and brainwallet passphrase. This would likely enable someone who isn't particularly familiar with programming to nevertheless validate strings to see if they are indeed private keys.

It also can convert from keys of one coin to another. While the underlying private key remains the same, different coins have different network prefixes. If someone has a wallet dump but is unsure of the actual coin the wallet is supposed to contain, the site can provide a way to convert the existing WIF private key into a myriad of different private keys on different chains, which may be helpful in identification. It can also create bech32 and segwit addresses from WIF keys where relevant.

Granted, these are pretty niche uses, but use cases nonetheless, whatever the intent of the makers of the site.