Do they have a buyer for that $400k? If not, it's not worth $400K.
The market is liquid enough to absorb a sale for $400K.
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Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
361–370 of 428 posts
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
How could this work with less than 1 bit of data per key? Assuming there are no duplicates, which is a sensible assumption, you’d need a minimum of 100,000,000 bits to store 100,000,000 unique entries larger than 1 bit with even a perfect hash function.
Maybe storing ranges or similar
Assuming no duplicates, the only case that would make sense would be if all but a single byte was different (sequentially across all records). Even then you’d end up with more than the number of bytes we’re talking about, even excluding the size of the index (which would be non-trivial).
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recommend to everyone to take their 12 words, write em 3 times on a piece of paper, cut it into 9 pieces and hide them in places only you’d know
So nobody will be able to recover them if you are hit by a bus or develop dementia? This problem is harder if you want to pass on your crypto after you can't use them anymore.
That's exactly right
If you want to enable recovery, you should give ownership of things to smart contracts, which enable things like succession rules and a heatbeat checkin etc.
Public/private keys are not designed to solve that kind of governance problem.
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#364[dead]
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
More efficient than brute forcing a private key, as you would have to do when you don't have the public key.
Sure, finding a private key whose public key's hash is given might be 2x slower, but Pollard's rho algorithm is 2^128 times faster.
Asymptotically, an additional hash at the end doesn't matter when you brute force. But it prevents you from using Pollard's rho algorithm, which does make a difference asymptotically.
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, in California, City of Albany, Target store near San Francisco, refused to take cash at the checkout not long ago.
I saw a few places stop accepting cash during covid days but most have started accepting it again. The one place that I frequent that still doesn’t is the haircut store in my town. There are not a lot of options so it’s card or go somewhere that charges almost double.
What's weird to me is that you guys frame it as a bad thing. For me as a European it's the opposite, I'm in trouble if someone doesn't take card. Nobody carries cash any more.
I think pretty much all stores still accept cash, but most people here just never withdraw any. It's pretty much just old people and people buing illegal stuff
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vitalik didn't rollback the chain. The entire community agreed that it was the correct thing to do and did it. Thats how consensus mechanisims work. This was easier then because the community was tiny. It would be impossible now. The proof of this is that some people didn't agree with undoing that transaction. They stayed on the old chain, which is now worthless. This is such a boring and widely known story now, but…
I was going to write a more indirect response by way of analogy, but it got too unwieldy. TL;DR: I was predisposed to taking the position you are advocating for, but this argument is incredibly weak while demonstrating the problem, to the point it made me wonder about my own priors. Shape-shifts from "this was totally fine and normal" to "but totally couldn't do it today" to "and guess what the ppl who didn't want to…
That's what it means to have two chains. One chain undid the transaction. One did not. Do I really need to explain this? Both things happened because there are 2 chains. Only one of them is worth something but they both exist.
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
electricity is basically fungible (minus a distance factor). So if you're using up the cheap, renewable electricity for mining, guess what you're using for everyone else's day-to-day electricity? Yep, fossil fuels. ( https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m... ) One major exception to this is geothermal electricity in places like iceland where there's abundant green electricity, but you can't tran…
the distance factor is a primary consideration when it comes to electricity; most electricity is consumed within hundreds of kilometers from where it's produced, because only in china is there uhvdc transmission, and even inside china there isn't nearly enough uhvdc and hvdc transmission capacity to meet demand
consequently, there are lots of places where there's abundant green electricity that can't be economically transported to any neighbors, which is why green electricity is cheaper than coal, nuclear, and gas energy. if it could be economically transported, it would be; instead, it is sold locally at much lower prices. only rarely is this seen by residential end-users, but in much of the world the 15-minute prices paid on the wholesale market by electric utilities are public information, so you can easily verify this
as a result of that, just using renewable sources for electricity does actually make mining renewable
as for the grauniad article, there are a lot of people doing unprofitable business things in lots of businesses, but they tend to be self-limiting, because those people run out of money before long
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
No knowing the public key reduces the number of keys you have to attempt to find the corresponding private key. If it required the same number of attempts they would have just found it first without having to wait for the broadcast to snipe it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard%27s_rho_algorithm_for_...
Wait Pollard rho runtime is based on the order of the group not the size of the private key. Maybe there's more to it? This strikes me as more of a hidden number problem. But to make it work you need to observe something using that small number. A transaction might have been enough.
It's very easy to make sqrt(n) DLP solvers for known subranges.
Here is a trivial one:
In advance, make a table of all the pubkeys xG for secret key s = (0,2^33].
When you get a target key T, compute T - (2^33)xG for x = (0,2^33] and look up the result in the table.
When you get a hit, you've found the private key for T it's (2^33)x + s.
Of course, this is a trivialized example, many optimizations are possible and you can specialize any generic DL solver to work in a known range.
Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was going to write a more indirect response by way of analogy, but it got too unwieldy. TL;DR: I was predisposed to taking the position you are advocating for, but this argument is incredibly weak while demonstrating the problem, to the point it made me wonder about my own priors. Shape-shifts from "this was totally fine and normal" to "but totally couldn't do it today" to "and guess what the ppl who didn't want to…
That's what it means to have two chains. One chain undid the transaction. One did not. Do I really need to explain this? Both things happened because there are 2 chains. Only one of them is worth something but they both exist.
I think you got too spun up by the evil They you usually hear talking about this: whatever you're saying here sounds obvious.
The reason why people got confused with your comment is because ex. you purport it was fine, it can never happen again, and everyone who didn't agree went to 0.
Lot of tensions between those things.
We also understand how one person could have those views and even steelman it into something intellectually consistent. But then the post seems really off because it's sort of a rushed, poor, justification for why you believe something, coupled to bemoaning some sort of unrelated group none of us are privy to.