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Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

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Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#371
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about superiority, it’s about the pie in the sky claims made by crypto, none of which have demonstrably helped real world use cases at any scale. Even taking your example coin, they’re making it production-grade, for what? How many people seriously use it? What is the real plan to adoption? Or is it just another fun tech project.

Each transaction uses a tenth the energy of a credit card, confirmed in milliseconds. It's decentralized. It's secure. Isn't controlled by a shadowy entity working to hoard wealth and power backed up by military threat. Etc. Why am I doing basic research for you? These aren't "pie in the sky" "claims", they are statements of fact that can be verified by trying it out yourself. I already linked the docs if you want to…

My point about the features you claim have to do with adoption and scale. You don’t need crypto to make a more efficient payment network.

Regarding nano-gpt, that’s already a solved problem. Literally all API platforms support pay-as-you-go credits. I went to your link, and I loved the irony of them asking for a 0.10$ minimum deposit - note the complete lack of crypto rates. That is par for the course for crypto apps, nobody cares what the coin conversion is - it’s just a gimmick.

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#372
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The exact details are beyond me but knowing the public key cuts the required private keys you need to test in half. Public keys are included in the transaction but normal keys have enough bits they're effectively protected even with their raw entropy cut in half. 128 bits are still more than you can effectively brute force but the 33 bits left for this challenge is far easier which let the attacker snipe the reward b…

Half of 2^66 is 2^65

Re: Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

#373
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

But that's not the range in question, this one has 66 bits. You're describing a meet in the middle attack but the runtime would be too high

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

#374
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true for all of the future? I suppose it's only a matter of time before Satoshi's and all the lost wallets will be broken? Even if it's 70 years from now before we have the compute to do that, the wallets will be worth so much by then that whoever does that will end up with a level of money that is high enough to menace and threaten entire countries if they are malicious. Why doesn't Bitcoin require keys to g…

I think you underestimate how big the number of 2^128 ECDSA operations are. It is 20 orders of magnitude bigger than the puzzle that was just solved (that took 2 years). There is no way we scale our compute that much in 70 years unless we start building Dyson spheres. To answer your question that change in bitcoin can happen at any point in time with a protocol update. It would probably won’t even require a hard fork…

> no way we scale our compute that much in 70 years

Huh? Ask someone in 1950 if we would ever achieve petaflops on a desktop-sized PC. Yet here we are with H100's. About 10 decimal orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art in 1950.

Quantum computing will also happen, and I think 70 years is more than a realistic time frame.

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

#375
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imo nano had it's time in the limelight to shine and has just slowly died out. The Raiblocks and BitGrail hack sealed it's death.

Raiblocks was never hacked, an exchange was (though it could have been an inside job, and BitGrail was at the very least negligent). Very different, though yes, still damaging. And this isn't about personal beliefs, market cap, market share, etc. The conversational point was that it's technically vastly superior to BTC, which it undeniably is. On market cap, adoption and hype, BTC wins hands down, for now, but there'…

I love crypto, not dunking on it.

The FranciscoTheBomber admin of BitGrail should have served prison time over the entire thing. He got off basically with zero consequences.

Nano will never be in the top 100 of crypto projects ever again. That's just a fact.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But touch that $1B+ wallet and suddenly nothing is worth anything... so if I had the capability to silently steal money from the bitcoin blockchain, I would go slow, and in discrete places.

Coin ignorant here: Why would it not be worth anything?

I think the other factor to consider is that once you try to sell $200B worth of Bitcoin, the value of Bitcoin suddenly drops to near zero (due to supply/demand).

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

#377
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

But that's not the range in question, this one has 66 bits. You're describing a meet in the middle attack but the runtime would be too high

My example is specifically for a 66-bit range. There are two loops in my post, one removes 2^33 multiples of 2^33, the other builds a table to check for values with a 33-bit range. My example will find a solution in a 66-bit range using only 2^34 point operations and 2^33 table lookups.

Work thought it, I think it'll be more informative than me simply repeating myself further. If you're still confused, ask specific questions and I'll be glad to answer.

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

#378
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Why don’t you just read what the guy said by following the links in the forum? Surely, you can find more explanation there that will answer some of your questions? Hahaha! :)

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

#379

We had fraudsters using modal.com compute to solve this challenge. It's not traditional mining software so it didn't initially get flagged, but we've updated our detection to catch it now[1]. 1. https://modal.com/blog/catching-cryptominers

FYI something is wrong with your client side routing. From the blog post, clicking on your logo, the URL updates to the homepage but the content doesn't change til I do a full page reload.

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

#380
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each transaction uses a tenth the energy of a credit card, confirmed in milliseconds. It's decentralized. It's secure. Isn't controlled by a shadowy entity working to hoard wealth and power backed up by military threat. Etc. Why am I doing basic research for you? These aren't "pie in the sky" "claims", they are statements of fact that can be verified by trying it out yourself. I already linked the docs if you want to…

My point about the features you claim have to do with adoption and scale. You don’t need crypto to make a more efficient payment network. Regarding nano-gpt, that’s already a solved problem. Literally all API platforms support pay-as-you-go credits. I went to your link, and I loved the irony of them asking for a 0.10$ minimum deposit - note the complete lack of crypto rates. That is par for the course for crypto apps…

> nobody cares what the coin conversion is

TBF, that particular data-point tends to have a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" extrapolation, ex:

1. "If sellers only care about what regular currency it can be turned into, that means it has failed as a currency because it's just an intermediate payment scheme."

2. "If sellers don't care about what regular currency it can become, that probably means it has failed as a currency because it's really just a speculative-bubble asset."

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