Large Bitcoin Collider Is Generating Trillions of Keys and Breaking into Wallets • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by salesguy222 » Sun, Apr 16, 2017, 3:46 PM UTC

obstinate wrote: post #56

salesguy222 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Three days from when you become aware does not seem unreasonable to me. Further losses are preventable and if you choose not to prevent them, it makes sense to me that you should bear some responsibility. I'm not sure what you mean when you say you have to spend money to be made whole. I'm not aware of the banks having any right to charge you in order to get them to comply with the law. Would you please explain?

You would need to sue them in a court of law if they don't comply, which involves hiring a lawyer, which of course is needlessly expensive.

A bank that follows the law after your money has gone poof is the /best/ situation you can hope for, and probably isn't the /average/ or /median/ situation.

I don't check my many bank accounts every day and I prefer to spend days out in the wild with little internet. I will not be a happy camper on the day I'm hacked and my bank tries to explain why it's my fault that they can't pay me :)

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

#62

Post by obstinate » Sun, Apr 16, 2017, 7:31 PM UTC

salesguy222 wrote: post #61

obstinate wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three days from when you become aware does not seem unreasonable to me. Further losses are preventable and if you choose not to prevent them, it makes sense to me that you should bear some responsibility. I'm not sure what you mean when you say you have to spend money to be made whole. I'm not aware of the banks having any right to charge you in order to get them to comply with the law. Would you please explain?

You would need to sue them in a court of law if they don't comply, which involves hiring a lawyer, which of course is needlessly expensive. A bank that follows the law after your money has gone poof is the /best/ situation you can hope for, and probably isn't the /average/ or /median/ situation. I don't check my many bank accounts every day and I prefer to spend days out in the wild with little internet. I will not b…

I know several people who have had their bank accounts stolen at one point or another, and it's never required a lawsuit to be made whole. This is because almost all the transactions by which you can lose money through your bank are reversible, except for cash withdrawals.

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

#63

Post by joshschreuder » Mon, Apr 17, 2017, 2:03 AM UTC

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.

How would you sell that many coins to guarantee maximum payoff? Surely getting access and attempting to sell Satoshi's stash would trigger a massive panic in the market?

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

#64

Post by Kinnard » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 3:25 AM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #49

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 wallet…

While agree the increase in supply would drop the price I don't think the Spanish Price Revolution is analogous . . I think that's more analogous to what cryptocurrencies are doing to the Dollar.

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

#65

Post by lern_too_spel » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 1:15 AM UTC

Kinnard wrote: post #64

lern_too_spel wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wallet…

While agree the increase in supply would drop the price I don't think the Spanish Price Revolution is analogous . . I think that's more analogous to what cryptocurrencies are doing to the Dollar.

In what way? Cryptocurrencies can be treated as just another asset.

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

#66

Post by Kinnard » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 2:38 AM UTC

lern_too_spel wrote: post #65

Kinnard wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While agree the increase in supply would drop the price I don't think the Spanish Price Revolution is analogous . . I think that's more analogous to what cryptocurrencies are doing to the Dollar.

In what way? Cryptocurrencies can be treated as just another asset.

Assets than can be created ex nihilo which will drive inflation.

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

#67

Post by gogeek » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 10:36 PM UTC

josst wrote: post #4

Bedon292 wrote: post #2

Very interesting work. 3 Quintillion keys generated, 3 private keys with coin in them. I have to wonder what processing power is being put into it, and if that power would be more effective at just mining coin, if someone were just after the money. At least in the short term. I think in the long term attacks like this might become more and more prevalent. Because at some point it may be easier to do this than mine ne…

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.

Guessing keys should never be an option, otherwise Bitcoin needs to upgrade its cryptographic functions. The supply will be shrinking in the sense of the asset/currency becoming deflationary at some point, as soon as 'lost Bitcoins > mining reward'. The limit of 21 million is arbitrary. Actually the current maximum in terms of units is 2,100 trillion, as you can divide every Bitcoin in 10^8 units. As a hard fork can update this denomination, there is nothing that limits Bitcoin to be adopted by a large audience.