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The chances of hitting a particular wallet you want to hack are 1/2^256 or some absurdly minuscule number, but the chances of hitting some wallet are higher because there are so many opportunities to get lucky.
This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?
If you check 1 billion addresses a second, and there are 100 million addresses with a balance, then it would take on average roughly (2^256 / 10^8) * 10^-9 seconds, which is 36717430630808027468154168254911183362909051 billion years. EDIT: Only 463439129036942 billion years, taking into account that there are effectively only 2^160 addresses.
This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?
If you check 1 billion addresses a second, and there are 100 million addresses with a balance, then it would take on average roughly (2^256 / 10^8) * 10^-9 seconds, which is 36717430630808027468154168254911183362909051 billion years. EDIT: Only 463439129036942 billion years, taking into account that there are effectively only 2^160 addresses.
This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?
I have a script[1] that generates a pub+private key and checks against a massive file of addresses with BTC[2]. The list of addresses is loaded in memory as a python `set` so checking is O(1), but I feel like optimisations at increasing the rate are futile, since no matter what you're basically rolling the die and hoping RNG lands on your side in your lifetime and your universe of all possible universes.
1. https://github.com/theden/btc-heist
2. https://bitkeys.work/download.php has a weekly updated CSV of all known addresses with nonzero BTC balance
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you check 1 billion addresses a second, and there are 100 million addresses with a balance, then it would take on average roughly (2^256 / 10^8) * 10^-9 seconds, which is 36717430630808027468154168254911183362909051 billion years. EDIT: Only 463439129036942 billion years, taking into account that there are effectively only 2^160 addresses.
You could shorten that by recognising the address space is more like 2^160 in BTC, due to the address generation process, more than one private key can spend from a given address, technically.
no, they aren't.
This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?
With every supercomputer working for 100 years, you can have 0.01% of all accounts, maybe.
2^256 is a very large number. If you could build a computer that required a single atom, and could test the balance of a single account in a single nanosecond, and then converted the entirety of the earth into such computers, it would take ~2.8 million years for you to check 0.01% of all accounts.
Brute-forcing modern cryptography isn't something that can happen. The magnitude of 2^256 is close to the count of atoms in the entire observable universe.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you check 1 billion addresses a second, and there are 100 million addresses with a balance, then it would take on average roughly (2^256 / 10^8) * 10^-9 seconds, which is 36717430630808027468154168254911183362909051 billion years. EDIT: Only 463439129036942 billion years, taking into account that there are effectively only 2^160 addresses.
Is that the average time until the first collision, or the time it will take to generate all possible private keys?