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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

#2

Post by Bedon292 »

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 new bitcoin.

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

#4

Post by josst »

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.

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

#5

Post by api »

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.

The new mining...

This would basically make Bitcoin Keynesian, since coin stored in wallets would now decay with a given probability. So you would have to invest it at least a little to beat the decay (shrinkage) rate.

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

#6

Post by hrehhf »

It appears that they are finding the private keys for transactions that already occurred. Reusing an address is not part of Bitcoin's design and it was never intended for people to do that. By not reusing addresses (not reusing private keys) I think one would be immune to this attack. The article doesn't seem to have much detail; anyone have more detail on this?

Edit: The details are in the URL posted by alphydan; it looks like address reuse does not matter with their method.

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

#8

Post by TheDong »

hrehhf wrote: post #6

It appears that they are finding the private keys for transactions that already occurred. Reusing an address is not part of Bitcoin's design and it was never intended for people to do that. By not reusing addresses (not reusing private keys) I think one would be immune to this attack. The article doesn't seem to have much detail; anyone have more detail on this? Edit: The details are in the URL posted by alphydan; it…

To receive anything, you must have an address (the public key).

All coins (UTXO) are associated with addresses which must have private keys.

It's impossible to only have a public/private keypair for the instant a transaction is being made because the UXTOs must be owned spendable by some public/private keypair while a transaction containing them is not immediately happening.

You clearly don't understand what you're talking about.

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

#9

Post by TheDong »

hrehhf wrote: post #6

It appears that they are finding the private keys for transactions that already occurred. Reusing an address is not part of Bitcoin's design and it was never intended for people to do that. By not reusing addresses (not reusing private keys) I think one would be immune to this attack. The article doesn't seem to have much detail; anyone have more detail on this? Edit: The details are in the URL posted by alphydan; it…

To receive anything, you must have an address (the public key).

All coins (UTXO) are associated with addresses which must have private keys.

It's impossible to only have a public/private keypair for the instant a transaction is being made because the UXTOs must be owned spendable by some public/private keypair while a transaction containing them is not immediately happening.

You clearly don't understand what you're talking about.

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

#10

Post by alphydan »

vbezhenar wrote: post #7

It seems suspicious. Bitcoin cryptography isn't broken, AFAIK, so chance to randomly break into any real wallet should be almost non-existent. I think, they either lying or exploit something different, like RNG weakness.

This explains the approach in more detail: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/man/theory
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