241–250 of 398 posts
I'm surprised by the amount of wallets its hitting that have had transactions. Like ~5% perhaps. Would have guess a far lower number. Almost suggests bots would have perhaps luck at hitting a live one. Which seems somewhat counterintuitive.
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This is a rare care where "astronomically low" is actually underselling how unlikely something is.
By many orders of magnitude, I think. There are only estimated to be 10^24 or so stars, which is a lot less than 2^256, right. Astronomical is not in the same league.
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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.
Why a thief? Bitcoin is a silly idea based on scarcity that doesn't exist. If someone generated the right numbers by chance and had luck, I wouldn't say they'd be doing anything wrong getting whatever is there. It's not the same as stealing data, and is not the same as hacking into a banking system. It's decentralized, and there isn't the concept of real scarcity. It's not even hacking. https://henvic.dev/posts/bitco…
There are actual laws in the US that if you find money, you are supposed to report it to the authorities, and if no one reports losing the money in some fixed time (30 days?) then you keep it.
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Not easily, as you need to do an elliptic curve point x scalar multiplication, which takes tons of cycles on a CPU and even tons of gates on an ASIC. Please provide a link to hardware that can do it much faster...
Two or more of whatever you are using to perform the calculations? I mean it won't appreciably shorten the search time but it would double the processing rate.
If you can't exponentially increase the amount of power / transactions you don't really have a chance of figuring out a collision.
100x machines with a computation that takes 100 billion years is still 1 billion years.
Obligatory reminder about the birthday problem - the probability that someone birthday is a particular day is 1/365, but the chances of two people in a group of 30 having the same birthday is very high - because the universe has so many combinations of people to work with. 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…
Even if there were 10^18 wallets your chance of finding any private key is effectively zero
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This is a rare care where "astronomically low" is actually underselling how unlikely something is.
By many orders of magnitude, I think. There are only estimated to be 10^24 or so stars, which is a lot less than 2^256, right. Astronomical is not in the same league.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a rare care where "astronomically low" is actually underselling how unlikely something is.
By many orders of magnitude, I think. There are only estimated to be 10^24 or so stars, which is a lot less than 2^256, right. Astronomical is not in the same league.
It'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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By many orders of magnitude, I think. There are only estimated to be 10^24 or so stars, which is a lot less than 2^256, right. Astronomical is not in the same league.
There are an estimated 10^80 fundamental particles (quarks, electrons, photons... mostly photons) in the observable universe, which is pretty close to 2^256 as these things go. "Cosmological" doesn't have quite the same ring to it though.
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Why a thief? Bitcoin is a silly idea based on scarcity that doesn't exist. If someone generated the right numbers by chance and had luck, I wouldn't say they'd be doing anything wrong getting whatever is there. It's not the same as stealing data, and is not the same as hacking into a banking system. It's decentralized, and there isn't the concept of real scarcity. It's not even hacking. https://henvic.dev/posts/bitco…
Because whether or not Bitcoin is silly, someone else paid their hard earned money for the coins, usually we say that makes someone the owner. What do you usually call someone who takes a thing from its owner without permission?