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Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

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Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#41

Post by obstinate »

salesguy222 wrote: post #37
pavel_lishin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, aren't bank accounts only insured by the government for up to $250,000 per account?

To make matters worse, they're only insured to 250k in the event of a bank failure (running out of money) having your account or identity hacked, on the other hand, you are on your own to make sure the bank replenishes your account ^.^

That is not true. The law obligates the bank to make you whole (subject to certain limits if you delay reporting until well after you knew of the theft).

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#42

Post by salesguy222 »

obstinate wrote: post #41
salesguy222 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make matters worse, they're only insured to 250k in the event of a bank failure (running out of money) having your account or identity hacked, on the other hand, you are on your own to make sure the bank replenishes your account ^.^

That is not true. The law obligates the bank to make you whole (subject to certain limits if you delay reporting until well after you knew of the theft).

The first tier is 3 days. Additionally, you need to spend money to be made whole, which you can of course sue for legal costs afterwards.

These are non-trivial steps and there are not many banks waiting out there to just give you your money back without some prodding

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#43

Post by [deleted] »

obstinate wrote: post #41
salesguy222 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To make matters worse, they're only insured to 250k in the event of a bank failure (running out of money) having your account or identity hacked, on the other hand, you are on your own to make sure the bank replenishes your account ^.^

That is not true. The law obligates the bank to make you whole (subject to certain limits if you delay reporting until well after you knew of the theft).

[deleted]

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#44

Post by joobus »

ZirconCode wrote: post #40
Animats wrote: post #32

About 10% of Bitcoins were created early, before 2012, and have never been traded. If somebody ever finds the key of the early lost Bitcoins, they'll have a huge payoff, over a billion dollars. Speculation is that either "Satoshi Nakamoto", whoever he is, is holding onto them for a big payoff, or somebody lost the private key for all those early Bitcoins. As the years go on, the second explanation seems more likely.

Or he didn't loose it and isn't motivated by money. Which seems also likely since he had the skills and decided not to cash in on the fame either.

Or Satoshi died, which has been another theory.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#45

Post by sanswork »

xseven wrote: post #14
josst wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is finite and one would expect the supply to become smaller over time thanks to keys being lost or owners dying and their accounts being inaccessible. In the long term guessing keys may be the only way to obtain new coins.

Not true. Mining at later stages will provide miners with transaction fees which will be significantly high enough for them to focus on keeping the network secure rather trying to find colliding keys

No coins to provide transaction fees if they are all lost though which is what the person you were replying to was saying.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#46

Post by acjohnson55 »

joobus wrote: post #44
ZirconCode wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or he didn't loose it and isn't motivated by money. Which seems also likely since he had the skills and decided not to cash in on the fame either.

Or Satoshi died, which has been another theory.

E.g. Hal Finney https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#47

Post by tobltobs »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #31
bigtimeidiot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then maybe one should have several wallets and spread one's Bitcoin funds among these wallets, to dilute the risk Sounds like Bitcoin is ready for the mainstream!

To be fair, aren't bank accounts only insured by the government for up to $250,000 per account?

In the EU usually only up to EU100.000 per account.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#48

Post by Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd »

mankash666 wrote: post #23
chejazi wrote: post #15

Not sure their what their heuristics are for narrowing the search space, but there certainly are some good ones. For instance, early versions of blockchain.info's wallet generated private keys by reading an ARC4 stream that had been seeded with Math.random() calls xor'd with timestamps. Quite the circus!

If collisions exist in the hashing algorithm, how you derive the seed for a random number generator is pointless

Every hashing algorithm has collisions, for good cryptographic ones there's just no practical way of finding them.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#49

Post by lern_too_spel »

Animats wrote: post #32

About 10% of Bitcoins were created early, before 2012, and have never been traded. If somebody ever finds the key of the early lost Bitcoins, they'll have a huge payoff, over a billion dollars. Speculation is that either "Satoshi Nakamoto", whoever he is, is holding onto them for a big payoff, or somebody lost the private key for all those early Bitcoins. As the years go on, the second explanation seems more likely.

Gaining access to the early wallets and bringing those Bitcoins into circulation will lead to a crash in Bitcoin value due to both increasing the supply (as in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Price_Revolution?wpr...) and decreasing confidence of other Bitcoin holders in the security of their wallets. You could extract some portion of the value if you do it slowly and pretend that Nakamoto is using his wallets, but you will not be able to extract their current market value.

Re: Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets

#50

Post by lern_too_spel »

xseven wrote: post #14
josst wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is finite and one would expect the supply to become smaller over time thanks to keys being lost or owners dying and their accounts being inaccessible. In the long term guessing keys may be the only way to obtain new coins.

Not true. Mining at later stages will provide miners with transaction fees which will be significantly high enough for them to focus on keeping the network secure rather trying to find colliding keys

Unless you have a hidden advantage, the cost of mining and the reward for collecting transaction fees will converge. The capital required to become a miner is very small, and the amount that a user can offer for fees is easy to change, allowing the market to be very efficient.
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