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Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

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Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#51

Post by lern_too_spel »

api wrote: post #5
josst wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is finite and one would expect the supply to become smaller over time thanks to keys being lost or owners dying and their accounts being inaccessible. In the long term guessing keys may be the only way to obtain new coins.

The new mining... This would basically make Bitcoin Keynesian, since coin stored in wallets would now decay with a given probability. So you would have to invest it at least a little to beat the decay (shrinkage) rate.

You're mixing up Keynesianism with money supply increases due to changes to the reserve ratio, discount rate, and printed currency. These happen to central bank controlled fiat money regardless of whether the people controlling the money supply are Keynesian.

Then you conflated losing some percentage of your cash assets due to inflation, which can happen even if the money supply does not change, to losing all of your cash assets with some probability. The former encourages investment, while the latter encourages not holding cash at all.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#52

Post by scintill76 »

chejazi wrote: post #15

Not sure their what their heuristics are for narrowing the search space, but there certainly are some good ones. For instance, early versions of blockchain.info's wallet generated private keys by reading an ARC4 stream that had been seeded with Math.random() calls xor'd with timestamps. Quite the circus!

I believe there was a time when blockchain.info's Android wallet generated keys from Apache's 301 redirect HTML fetched over HTTP[1].

I think there's also a lesson about idiot-proofing APIs. With the benefit of this in hindsight, I might instead return an invalid, non-HTTP response that blows up every major HTTP client internally, so that it's impossible for the API consumer code to happily truck along interpreting a non-200 response body as if it's valid random data.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/37nlg1/i_was_the_g...

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#54

Post by billions »

TheDong wrote: post #27
panarky wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin becomes unspendable and worthless when the private keys are lost. But when you have the private keys, your Bitcoin doesn't "decay". On the contrary, it becomes more scarce, and therefore more valuable.

You missed the point. Once the primary way of gaining bitcoins is hacking wallets, the longer a bitcoin is behind the same private key, the longer that given wallet is a target.

IMO, the most vulnerable wallets are going to be the ones actively in use and stored insecurely, for example, on Windows machines subject to the recent NSA bug.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#56

Post by obstinate »

salesguy222 wrote: post #42
obstinate wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not true. The law obligates the bank to make you whole (subject to certain limits if you delay reporting until well after you knew of the theft).

The first tier is 3 days. Additionally, you need to spend money to be made whole, which you can of course sue for legal costs afterwards. These are non-trivial steps and there are not many banks waiting out there to just give you your money back without some prodding

Three days from when you become aware does not seem unreasonable to me. Further losses are preventable and if you choose not to prevent them, it makes sense to me that you should bear some responsibility.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say you have to spend money to be made whole. I'm not aware of the banks having any right to charge you in order to get them to comply with the law. Would you please explain?

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#57

Post by pavel_lishin »

joobus wrote: post #44
ZirconCode wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or he didn't loose it and isn't motivated by money. Which seems also likely since he had the skills and decided not to cash in on the fame either.

Or Satoshi died, which has been another theory.

I imagine he would have planned for such an eventuality.

(Although, "let the coins vanish" is as valid a plan as any.)

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#58

Post by estro »

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd wrote: post #48
mankash666 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If collisions exist in the hashing algorithm, how you derive the seed for a random number generator is pointless

Every hashing algorithm has collisions, for good cryptographic ones there's just no practical way of finding them.

There is no practical way of finding a collision for a specific key. Finding collisions to one of the created keys non-specifically is a much smaller search space.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#59

Post by kordless »

josst wrote: post #4
Bedon292 wrote: post #2

Very interesting work. 3 Quintillion keys generated, 3 private keys with coin in them. I have to wonder what processing power is being put into it, and if that power would be more effective at just mining coin, if someone were just after the money. At least in the short term. I think in the long term attacks like this might become more and more prevalent. Because at some point it may be easier to do this than mine ne…

Bitcoin is finite and one would expect the supply to become smaller over time thanks to keys being lost or owners dying and their accounts being inaccessible. In the long term guessing keys may be the only way to obtain new coins.

This is a common irrational argument (meaning it requires more work to determine truth) regarding the exhaustion of "supply". A "coin" is simply a numeric value in a wallet of a whole amount. Fractional amounts can, and will, continue to be "created" using subdivision of existing coin. There is, with future code changes, no limit to the precision of the values stored there, so even a sub fraction of a bitcoin will still do to serve the entire network, if the network is still operating, of course.

The deflation issue is what is really addressed here, where no new coins will be introduced at a given point. Whether new coin arrives or not, is really not an issue. An analogy would be the use of pennies if all the paper money went missing.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#60

Post by dang »

TheDong wrote: post #8
hrehhf wrote: post #6

It appears that they are finding the private keys for transactions that already occurred. Reusing an address is not part of Bitcoin's design and it was never intended for people to do that. By not reusing addresses (not reusing private keys) I think one would be immune to this attack. The article doesn't seem to have much detail; anyone have more detail on this? Edit: The details are in the URL posted by alphydan; it…

To receive anything, you must have an address (the public key). All coins (UTXO) are associated with addresses which must have private keys. It's impossible to only have a public/private keypair for the instant a transaction is being made because the UXTOs must be owned spendable by some public/private keypair while a transaction containing them is not immediately happening. You clearly don't understand what you're t…

> You clearly don't understand what you're talking about.

Please don't be rude in HN comments.

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