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Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

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Re: Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

#14

Post by mritchie712 »

coinspin wrote: post #7
mritchie712 wrote: post #3

Why is the “top” data as of Nov 12th?

I just haven't updated it lately. Thanks for the reminder. I'll run the scripts now.

Nice, just curious, how exactly are you updating it? I've been working on https://luabase.com/ and started with Ethereum but plan to add bitcoin next.

Re: Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

#15

Post by coinspin »

mritchie712 wrote: post #14
coinspin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just haven't updated it lately. Thanks for the reminder. I'll run the scripts now.

Nice, just curious, how exactly are you updating it? I've been working on https://luabase.com/ and started with Ethereum but plan to add bitcoin next.

There's a blog post on the same site that talks about using https://github.com/in3rsha/bitcoin-utxo-dump. I'm running a pruned node, I use that lib to dump the address and balance to a csv and then I pull out the top 100 or so.

Re: Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

#17

Post by Cycl0ps »

coinspin wrote: post #8
Cycl0ps wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was interested in the idea too and dug further into the math. Assuming you could check hashes at the same rate as Bitcoin is currently mined at that's 202 Exa-hashes per second. If you had the world's hashing power working on guessing private keys, the odds of getting one on any given day are 1/6.70093E45

That's such a big number. I still fail at grasping really large numbers like that.

One Billion is 1.0E9, or a one followed by nine zeroes. so 6.0E45 is one billion to the power of 6, or six billion-billion-billion-billion-billion-billion, times six. At that point you can kind of just mad-libs each billion to be whatever you want "A billion Earths mining for a billion days, duplicated a billion times in a billion different simulated universes, and the odds of finding a hash after all that is still one in a billion, squared."

Or you can plug it into Wolfram Alpha and get it to find a comparison, in this case 6E45 is 0.011% of all possible chess combinations.

It does get worse than that though. A project I played with last year had me asking how many unique permutations there were for a 1920*1080 monitor. That number was around 10^10^77. I don't have any formal maths training and that one really threw me for a loop. To summarize 10^x means you have a number that's x digits long. So 10^6 means I have a six digit number. 10^10^x means that the number that describes how long my number is is x digits long. so 10^10^77 means that if I wanted to write out my number and count the number of zeros in it, that counting would give me a number 77 digits long. Math is weird.

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