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Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

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Re: Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

#4

Post by calrueb »

This is cool, and the linked Medium article helped me wrap my head around the security of Bitcoin wallets. I have wondered in the past why people mine blocks, but not try to “mine”/hack existing wallets.

It would be cool to add a running counter for “X wallets checked” on the webpage.

Re: Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

#5

Post by Cycl0ps »

calrueb wrote: post #4

This is cool, and the linked Medium article helped me wrap my head around the security of Bitcoin wallets. I have wondered in the past why people mine blocks, but not try to “mine”/hack existing wallets. It would be cool to add a running counter for “X wallets checked” on the webpage.

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

Re: Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

#6

Post by coinspin »

calrueb wrote: post #4

This is cool, and the linked Medium article helped me wrap my head around the security of Bitcoin wallets. I have wondered in the past why people mine blocks, but not try to “mine”/hack existing wallets. It would be cool to add a running counter for “X wallets checked” on the webpage.

That's a neat idea! It's currently all client side but I could add a simple endpoint to store/read the counts.

Re: Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

#8

Post by coinspin »

Cycl0ps wrote: post #5
calrueb wrote: post #4

This is cool, and the linked Medium article helped me wrap my head around the security of Bitcoin wallets. I have wondered in the past why people mine blocks, but not try to “mine”/hack existing wallets. It would be cool to add a running counter for “X wallets checked” on the webpage.

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.
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