Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

blockchain.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 428 posts

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#301

Post by fidelramos »

GTP wrote: post #267
fidelramos wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take on this [0] is that Bitcoin price was growing exponentially with demand, or more exactly with the expected future demand. Cryptocurrency always have had a lot of speculation behind them, not unlike any startup, and that is OK. As shown by the graph [0], adoption slowed down after 2016 when BTC blocks got consistently full and transaction fees rose to $50 and more. I believe if BTC had scaled to support more t…

I think you're describing Bitcoin Cash, but AFAIK it's worth less than original BTC. What you're not considering is the brand value of BTC being the first and most famous crypto currency.

I agree with part of what you say but not with the implication. Yes, Bitcoin Cash [0] is the Bitcoin that chose to scale on-chain. The split happened in 2017 and since then it has decreased in price both compared to BTC and USD.

What I strongly disagree with is that a Bitcoin with bigger blocks and hence larger transaction capacity is inherently less valuable. That is an unfair comparison because Bitcoin Cash, when the split happened in Aug 2017, could have been recognized as Bitcoin by the ecosystem, but it wasn't, and Bitcoin Core retained the BTC ticker. Because of that Bitcoin Cash had to start adoption from the beginning, losing Bitcoin's established network effects.

My original argument was that if Bitcoin had increased its blocksize before 2016 as Satoshi Nakamoto originally intended [1], then the Bitcoin Cash split wouldn't have happened, Bitcoin adoption would have continued growing (remember that back in the day big players like Microsoft, Dell, Steam and Newegg started accepting Bitcoin payments) and miners would progressively see more of their rewards coming from transaction fees and less from the block rewards.

This last point is one of the big problems with BTC right now: the network security will decrease in the face of dwindling block rewards unless transaction fees rise. I argue that Bitcoin was always supposed to scale in number of transactions, so the aggregate of transaction fees, even if individually inexpensive (roughly 1 cent), would become larger than the block reward. In other words: the block reward was just an economic incentive to kick-start the Bitcoin network, to attract miners that would secure it, but the transaction volume was meant to keep increasing to replace it.

[0] https://bitcoincash.org/

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#302

Post by orf »

keepamovin wrote: post #298
mrb wrote: post #2

Discussion thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64526037#... Bitcoin puzzles are private keys with just a few unknown bits so that anyone can bruteforce them to collect a reward. Puzzle 66 contained 66 unknown bits and had 6.6 BTC deposited into it by the initial puzzle creator. The private key was 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002832ed74f2b5e35ee or 256 bits with mostly ze…

Wow, that thread is nuts. Scrolled up just a bit saw this. My new public key search system is almost ready. I had to reinvent my binary database system because, although the database was lightweight https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5475626 , I had efficiency issues with binary search. This is now a thing of the past. I have designed a system that stores 100 million public keys in an 80 KB file, yes, what you r…

> This is now a thing of the past. I have designed a system that stores 100 million public keys in an 80 KB file

That’s 0.0064 bits per public key - so either there are lots of duplicates, or something is amiss here?

Edit: they don’t actually store the keys, so the quote is misleading.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#303

Post by quentinadam »

jamalaramala wrote: post #297
mrb wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No private key was posted too early. What happened is the person who spent all the computing power to brute force the 66 bits broadcasted, naively, a transaction to send the 6.6 BTC reward to his wallet. However, when doing so, the public key is by design revealed on the blockchain. Someone's bot whose sole purpose is to steal this puzzles rewards was monitoring the blockchain and spotted the transaction before it go…

Let me see if I understand it. If someone knows that a given address has a huge sum of money, they can create a bot to monitor that particular address, overriding any transactions to his own address? Would that be possible???

No that’s not how it works. When a transaction is submitted on the blockchain to withdraw funds from an address it needs to be signed by the private key and it exposes the full public key. A bot that would monitor such transactions would therefore see the public key. With just the public key you can’t create a valid signature, you still need the private key, however for this particular case, knowing the public key reduces the entropy of the puzzle by a factor of 2 (from 66 bits to 33 bits), so this puzzle was easier to solve for the bot knowing the public key published by the person who found the private key. This is very specific to this specific puzzle which had 66 bits of entropy. In general, bitcoin transactions have 256 bits of entropy.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#304

Post by Powdering7082 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #130
Powdering7082 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's no chance to stay safe when you put that kind of target on your back. Vitalik Buterin seems to be a counter example here, his net worth peaked around $1.46 billion. He has some interesting writing on how he stays secure. At one point the SHIBA token sent a huge amount of funds to his cold wallet and he details what he did to securely access those funds: https://decrypt.co/91000/ethereum-founder-vitalik-bute…

Is this basically saying he sent all the ETH out of his "account" (presumably to another one that was pre-generated & pre-shared half the private key with his family), so that it just had the Shiba tokens left in it? Then he didn't have to worry about the Shiba related transactions affecting his ETH?

Unfortunately I couldn't find a better writeup, although I remember it.

The basic problem was that they transferred into his "cold wallet" https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/hot-wallet-vs-c...

He didn't want to have the signal be that he was happy holding SHIBA and was uncomfortable with that much power & control over SHIBA. So he wanted to be able to transfer his SHIBA out to a hot wallet and then burn most of it and donate the rest, given the amount of money involved he took extra steps like buying a new computer to generate the new keys, airgapping it from the internet while it held the cold wallet keys etc

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#305

Post by mapt »

anothernewdude wrote: post #143
mapt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to prove that somebody has the ability to pick locks in order to protect your valuables, you leave the prize sitting on the kitchen table (at 66 bits of entropy) behind your relatively easy front door lock, not in a secure vault with triple redundant mechanisms. Somebody with the solution is going to be able to claim the money in far, far less computing time than they could claim a larger prize by breakin…

Except they don't need to take it now, just before anyone else does.

Let's say a given intelligence agency's quantum computing efforts have Shor working for 16 bit keys in 2025, for 64 bit keys in 2028, for 128 bit keys in 2033, and for 256 bit keys in 2038. Let's say competing intelligence agencies are 1-3 years behind. Let's say we make it to Puzzle 69 over the next four years. Nice.

I don't know how plausible that timeline is either in spacing or accuracy.

Sometime in early 2029, a bunch of people suddenly find that they're eligible for a $400,000 cash prize if they manage to secretly steal a bit of time on a working quantum computer. In 2030, that group of people doubles, and incorporates a new agency with its own security weaknesses. By 2031 we're talking about four separate countries with their own engineers that have managed to achieve the capability to claim that cash prize. Private corporations are somewhere on the horizon. Very soon this becomes an urgent imperative to anyone inclined, because the prize, like cash, disappears the moment that somebody else seizes it.

It's hard to keep conspiracies, particularly with a verifiable open offer of large amounts of highly portable money on the table to the first person to reveal secrets, and a gradually widening circle of access. The gradually expanding circle of access is what ensures we get some kind of alarm LONG before 2038. Keeping that secret to even 2033 requires hundreds of people and four agencies with diverse motivation and values to consistently turn down cash money for years on end in the interest of keeping their quantum capabilities hidden from the world.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#306

Post by andrewla »

n2d4 wrote: post #27
mrb wrote: post #2

Discussion thread here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1306983.msg64526037#... Bitcoin puzzles are private keys with just a few unknown bits so that anyone can bruteforce them to collect a reward. Puzzle 66 contained 66 unknown bits and had 6.6 BTC deposited into it by the initial puzzle creator. The private key was 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000002832ed74f2b5e35ee or 256 bits with mostly ze…

For those curious, the reason why a public key lets you find a private key more efficiently is Pollard's rho algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard%27s_rho_algorithm_for_...

This seems orthogonal to the concept. More efficiently than what?

Having the public key is easier than having an address because an address is the hash of a public key. So in order to crack an address, you must first find a public key that produces that address, and then find a private key corresponding to the public key.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#307

Post by yunohn »

kragen wrote: post #285
GTP wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's the electricity you're using produced? ;)

are we talking about people doing bitcoin mining or hash cracking? bitcoin mining is an extremely competitive business of finding the cheapest sources of energy and mining hardware; because the cheapest energy sources are all renewable, mining bitcoin with fossil-fuel-produced power is unprofitable. so the electricity we're using to mine bitcoin is mostly solar, wind, and hydroelectric as for the cracking, i don't th…

Finding the “cheapest” energy to do useless work, is still wasteful pollution.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#308

Post by yunohn »

mandmandam wrote: post #273
killerstorm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this "block lattice" secured?

Quite well, thank you! Coming up on nine years without hacks, and apparently quantum-resistant. The next release of Nano (the original and best imo*) manages spam to the point where fee-less sub-second transactions can be maintained even while under a directed spam attack. If you want to learn more there's plenty of documentation: Overview: https://docs.nano.org/what-is-nano/overview/ More technical docs: https://doc…

I was wondering where your previous comment was heading - I assumed you were referring to Yet Another Niche Cryptocoin, and that was confirmed. Thanks!

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#309

Post by keepamovin »

orf wrote: post #302
keepamovin wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that thread is nuts. Scrolled up just a bit saw this. My new public key search system is almost ready. I had to reinvent my binary database system because, although the database was lightweight https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5475626 , I had efficiency issues with binary search. This is now a thing of the past. I have designed a system that stores 100 million public keys in an 80 KB file, yes, what you r…

> This is now a thing of the past. I have designed a system that stores 100 million public keys in an 80 KB file That’s 0.0064 bits per public key - so either there are lots of duplicates, or something is amiss here? Edit: they don’t actually store the keys, so the quote is misleading.

“That quote is misleading” Hahaha! :)

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#310

Post by kemitche »

oniony wrote: post #119
mapt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to prove that somebody has the ability to pick locks in order to protect your valuables, you leave the prize sitting on the kitchen table (at 66 bits of entropy) behind your relatively easy front door lock, not in a secure vault with triple redundant mechanisms. Somebody with the solution is going to be able to claim the money in far, far less computing time than they could claim a larger prize by breakin…

Except your analogy doesn't work because every single bitcoin address has the same brand of lock.

Based on the other comments, is that true? The top comment here implied that the puzzle explicitly had a private key with all 0s except for 66 bits, so that lock was definitely weaker than a key with all bits unknown, right?
Post reply on HN