At what point does brute forcing wallet private keys become more lucrative for miners than mining? Presumably you can use almost identical hardware too.
In a couple trillion years.
All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
191–200 of 398 posts
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#192> Finding an active wallet is hard, but not impossible. Every time you open a random page, you have a chance of finding someone else's fortune. Good to know I have a 1/2^256 chance to find a bitcoin billionaire's wallet. This feels only slightly more ludicrous than the guy who lost his bitcoin in a hard drive and went looking for it in a dumpster.
It is not 1/2^256. It is "number of wallets with balance"/2^256.
actually its "number of wallets with balance"/2^160.
You don't need to find a specific private key, anyone will do that yields a public key that hashes to the BTC address.
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#193I was fascinated by a similar idea as a child, generating images of everything that has been, could be, or will be by exhaustively going through the possible combinations of pixels for some fixed size of image. Later realized that the number of combinations were impossibly large, although in some ways the models that generate photos of people that aren't real, etc are searching the same space just with a lot of direc…
Wow, I had this same idea as a kid too! I daydreamed about all the cool images you could generate. For example, you could create an image that describes the cure for cancer, because that's just another image, right?
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#194It'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…
And then, when you "hit the jackpot", will you become a thief? Or will you just feel like you picked a lock, smile and pull the door back shut.
As they say "the unstoppable law of unbreakable code". You will become the "rightful" owner of those tokens, unless they happen to belong to one of the Not-The-Owners of that particular blockchain. If they are, they will just fork a blockchain removing your money from your wallet. Vitalik and Co already did this with Ethereum after TheDAO contract execution as designed, because their own funds were affected.
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the expected speed up if using quantum techniques? Can quantum techniques allow one to more effectively search for a specific private key to a BTC account?
Well, theoretically, instantly. But that’s kind of like asking what if I had this potion that instantly cured every disease known to man and then some, what would happen. What sort of quantum computer are you talking about? How many qubits?
not exactly true
BTC addresses that have never sent BTC are not vulnerable to quantum computers as the public key is only sent when a transaction is made. The address you send to is a hash of the public key and irreversible even with quantum computers
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#196Soo 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?
The problem would be getting the money out without revealing your identity
OTC exchanger in Colombia, wear a custome in case there's cameras.
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#197I was fascinated by a similar idea as a child, generating images of everything that has been, could be, or will be by exhaustively going through the possible combinations of pixels for some fixed size of image. Later realized that the number of combinations were impossibly large, although in some ways the models that generate photos of people that aren't real, etc are searching the same space just with a lot of direc…
I remember being very young and theorizing that video games worked by having every possible frame that could exist for the game loaded onto them, and as you pressed buttons the game would show you the appropriate frames for your scenario. I guess because I had something of an understanding of how movies worked, I just assumed video games would be exactly the same.
Probably not the most efficient method of fitting a game onto a Gameboy cartridge!
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Astronomical. You could convert every computer into existence into hunting for used private keys, and run them for the lifetime of the universe, and you’d be unlikely to find even one used key.
What is the expected speed up if using quantum techniques? Can quantum techniques allow one to more effectively search for a specific private key to a BTC account?
Quantum computers can be used to crack public keys for a bitcoin account yes, but an addresses public keys are only published when a transaction is made
Best practice for secure bitcoin accounts is to always send the entire balance when making a transaction, and have the "change" go back to a new address
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
With every supercomputer working for 100 years, you can have 0.01% of all accounts, maybe.
... not even close. 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…
It's a large number but not close to the count of atom:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E256 > ≈ 0.0012 × the number of atoms in the visible universe (≈ 10^80)
Re: All Bitcoin private keys are on this website
#200It'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".
It's not at all what mining is
Miners aren't brute forcing keys to existing wallets and stealing the bitcoin, as that's effectively impossible even for the biggest mining rig (like, a mining rig the size of the sun couldn't do it in a trillion years)