Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really because if you are travelling at the speed of light time isn't passing...
Not a physicist, but I don’t imagine you can turn while going light speed
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All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
151–160 of 398 posts
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#152Soo what happens if you're incredibly lucky and stumble across the private key for an active wallet? If you transfer the funds out, isn't that just theft? Is "guessing" a private key any different from guessing someone's bank details?
If you go by the whole “code is law” approach talked about by some crypto people, then I guess it wouldn’t be theft? The blockchain has no concept of people/entities owning things, in that universe the ownership of an address is simply having its private key. (Of course in the real meat-world we have courts, non-code-contracts, and rule of law. It would probably be criminal, in the same way finding a weakness in e.g…
I don't know if "code is law" has to be invoked here. Isn't that a HN-specific strawman argument?
Anyways, of course you can take those coins as when you're running Bitcoin you're strictly speaking not signing a TOS and nobody ever owned those coins.
What people keep private are signing keys for a transaction output. But if you found the key independently, they should be yours too.
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#153Earlier 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.
Now that it looks like a phone number, one could unleash a horde of telemarketers at it.
Feels like a Hitchhiker’s quote:
"""Coincidentally, 2276709 is also the telephone number of a flat in Islington where Arthur once went to a party, met a nice girl, and lost her to a party-crasher. While the flat and telephone have been demolished along with Earth, they are forever linked to the fact that Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect—against all odds—are rescued 29 seconds after being ejected from the Vogon spaceship."""
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#154What would quantum comouting mean for Bitcoin?
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's the bank you would be stealing from, through fraud (impersonation, I guess). But Bitcoin is decentralized, so you wouldn't be stealing from anyone?
You're still stealing from someone, but it's harder for them to catch you.
Why would it be harder? There’s a ledger of your transactions available for analysis.
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#156Soo what happens if you're incredibly lucky and stumble across the private key for an active wallet? If you transfer the funds out, isn't that just theft? Is "guessing" a private key any different from guessing someone's bank details?
Next we’ll see a “Every checking account” website or “Every Social Security Number”
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#157Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#158Drat. I didn’t find any money.
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#159It's like passively playing the world's worst lottery in terms of odds, but hundreds of thousands of times every second. It's fun but the odds are astronomically low. 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 fut…
That's what mining is too, basically. It's just that a mining rig can "buy a lot more tickets".
This isn’t true at all.
Mining involves guessing a salt which, when added to data for a single block’s with of transactions, makes the hash have a certain sum of zeros.
They are only the same in that they are using randomness to search for some number satisfying a given criteria. But, for example, you couldn’t use mining hardware to search for wallets with open balances. The mining hardware is specially optimized for one thing only.
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#160This 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 assumes a uniform key space. If PRNGs used to generate keys are biased, then there may be a way to exploit that bias.