On Sunday, November 9th, headlines lit up with a bold accusation from China that the U.S. had quietly seized 127,000 stolen Bitcoins from the LuBian mining pool, worth nearly $13 billion as of writing this response. Behind the geopolitical drama, one chilling truth is buried in the report, LuBian’s wallet security failed because of weak entropy.

When “Random” Isn’t Random Enough

According to China’s CVERC, LuBian’s private keys were generated using the Mersenne Twister MT19937-32, a fast, but dangerously inappropriate pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) for cryptographic purposes. The result? Wallets are protected by just 32 bits of entropy, offering only 4.29 billion possible combinations, a trivial brute-force task for any moderately resourced attacker.

Once the vulnerability was discovered, the attack took less than two hours.

This wasn’t a software bug. It was an entropy failure.

The Cost of Weak Entropy in a Post-Quantum World

Real Random has long warned about the risks of relying on software-generated randomness. PRNGs like MT19937 were never designed for cryptographic key generation. They’re predictable, repeatable, and, as the LuBian case shows, exploitable.

The security of every blockchain wallet, VPN, certificate, or encrypted message starts with randomness. If that entropy is weak, the encryption built on top is a house of cards.

In a post-quantum future, this problem gets even worse. Quantum computers won’t need years to break weak keys—they’ll do it in seconds.

How Real Random Could Have Prevented This

Real Random solves the entropy problem at the root, delivering quantum-grade randomness through:

• True Random Number Generators (TRNGs) are built on physical phenomena, not algorithms
• Entropy-as-a-Service (EaaS) for scalable, API-accessible randomness across wallet platforms and blockchain infrastructure
• Keyless encryption systems using one-time pads derived from real entropy, never PRNGs
• On-prem or cloud deployments, so entropy never has to cross a public network

If LuBian had used TRNG-backed wallet generation, this brute-force attack wouldn’t have been possible. Period.

A Cautionary Tale for the Entire Crypto Ecosystem

The Chinese report ends with solid advice: “Fix your wallet code. Use real random number generators. Adopt multisig. Cold storage. Monitoring.” We couldn’t agree more.

But that first piece, “use real random number generators,” is the one most overlooked.

That’s where we come in.

Final Thought: Don’t Let RNG Be the Next CVE

This wasn’t just a crypto heist. It was a case study in why PRNGs have no place in cryptography, especially as quantum capabilities advance.

Real Random helps secure the post-quantum future by making quantum-grade entropy accessible today, in your wallets, your APIs, and your overall infrastructure. Contact us or book a demo to learn more about our solutions.

Because in cryptography, you either own your entropy, or someone else does.

Read more about the heist here on cryptorank.io