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What’s the chance of someone brute forcing the private key for these “wallets”? Given the size of today’s mining operations, could someone be targeting these W

• quesera 5y ago
  Brute forcing a BTC wallet private key is like counting to infinity: the earlier you start, and the faster you work, the sooner you’ll never get there. :) There are 2^256 possibilities. This thread is interesting: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4453897.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4453897.0 Recent key rates are 182 million keys/sec, so about 2^27 keys/sec. By my math (always suspect!), I think that means you have a 50% chance of finding a specific key, in 2^101 seconds => 8.0e22 years, or approximately 1.0e21 lifetimes. If you get together with 8 billion friends, you will have a 50% chance at cracking the wallet in only 125 billion lifetimes, but then if you split the wallet value evenly, you'll each only get $1.00 USD (at today's BTC-USD exchange rate -- might not be the same in 10 trillion years, but who knows??). If you have a meaningful fraction of a zillionth of this kind of computing resources available, you should put it to use mining instead! All bets are off if quantum computing ever happens.