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This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and gen
by frisco 5y ago
This raises a really interesting question. Though it’s essentially impossible to figure out the key for any given wallet… if you download the blockchain and generate private keys as fast as you can, how often do you find one that has a balance? Will there just be some ongoing very low but decidedly nonzero risk of all of your assets vanishing some day if you’re not using multisig?
- magma1983 5y agoWith every supercomputer working for 100 years, you can have 0.01% of all accounts, maybe.
- Tuna-Fish 5y ago... not even close. 2^256 is a very large number. If you could build a computer that required a single atom, and could test the balance of a single account in a single nanosecond, and then converted the entirety of the earth into such computers, it would take ~2.8 million years for you to check 0.01% of all accounts. Brute-forcing modern cryptography isn't something that can happen. The magnitude of 2^256 is close to the count of atoms in the entire observable universe.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago> The magnitude of 2^256 is close to the count of atoms in the entire observable universe. I've always heard that even 2¹²⁸ is significantly larger than that number (which is closer to 2⁸⁰). This page seems to support that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_content—number_of_atoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...
- V1ndaar 5y agoNope, the rough approximation of atoms in the universe is O(10^80). Big difference!
- codeflo 5y agoLook more carefully, the estimation according to Wikipedia is 10^80, which is roughly 2^266. (BTW, when converting 10^x to 2^x, times 3 is what I use for very rough back of the envelope estimations. Times 10/3 is actually almost precise, as log2(10) = 3.32…)
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y agoAh, so it's just me being stupid, as usual. Thanks, at least now I know.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- FabHK 5y ago> log2(10) = 3.32 or, to put it in simpler terms, 10^3 = 1000 ≈ 1024 = 2^10
- formerly_proven 5y agoThis reminds me of a discussion a few years ago where someone was extremely adamant that you'd have to handle the chance of a key collision in a random 256-bit key for the system to be secure :)
- rocqua 5y agoI might agree with them because your random process could be weaker than you think without having any indication until you hit the colision. Anything past detection and panicking might be overkill tho.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chokma 5y agoThe best quote for this is from Bruce Schneier: "... brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space." https://security.stackexchange.com/a/82412 https://security.stackexchange.com/a/82412
- edf13 5y agoIt's a large number but not close to the count of atom: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E256 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E256 > ≈ 0.0012 × the number of atoms in the visible universe (≈ 10^80)
- danuker 5y agoHuman-generated brainwallets are notoriously guessable: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zti1p/17956_hacked_brainwallet_passwords/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zti1p/17956_hacke...
- sdan 5y agoits like asking if you had a rocketship that traveled at the speed of light, how long until you find earth given you're on some random galaxy
- andy_ppp 5y agoNot really because if you are travelling at the speed of light time isn't passing...
- sdan 5y agodoes that technical mistake hinder the point of my comment?
- csomar 5y agoYes. You can't, technically, find earth while passing in speed of light. If you are travelling in light-speed, you'll reach destination in no time.
- the_gastropod 5y agoNot a physicist, but I don’t imagine you can turn while going light speed
- dwighttk 5y agoI can do whatever I want, I’m going light speed!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 5y agoIt is for earth though, which might be swallowed up by the sun at the spacetime you arrive.
- ithinkso 5y agoMiniscule, not zero of course but zero for any practical purpose. The search space is just that much bigger.
- Nextgrid 5y agoIntroducing the Large Bitcoin Collider: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about
- tromp 5y agoIf you check 1 billion addresses a second, and there are 100 million addresses with a balance, then it would take on average roughly (2^256 / 10^8) * 10^-9 seconds, which is 36717430630808027468154168254911183362909051 billion years. EDIT: Only 463439129036942 billion years, taking into account that there are effectively only 2^160 addresses.
- john_alan 5y agoYou could shorten that by recognising the address space is more like 2^160 in BTC, due to the address generation process, more than one private key can spend from a given address, technically.
- wruza 5y agoThis reduces that number of years by 28 digits, afaiu, and that is still a pretty big number of billions of years.
- berkes 5y agoIs that the average time until the first collision, or the time it will take to generate all possible private keys?
- tromp 5y agoAverage time until collision.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wruza 5y agoNow that it looks like a phone number, one could unleash a horde of telemarketers at it.
- ben_w 5y agoFeels like a Hitchhiker’s quote: """Coincidentally, 2276709 is also the telephone number of a flat in Islington where Arthur once went to a party, met a nice girl, and lost her to a party-crasher. While the flat and telephone have been demolished along with Earth, they are forever linked to the fact that Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect—against all odds—are rescued 29 seconds after being ejected from the Vogon spaceship."""
- lordnacho 5y agoOne thing you can do that's quite lucrative for someone is to generate all the keys corresponding to common dictionary words like "dog" and "cat". The way I know someone is doing this is I was testing some transactions and somehow whatever I was sending was immediately vanishing. So someone out there has taken a dictionary and done this already.
- Ekaros 5y agoI wonder if you could cut this down by focusing on know implementations and their random number generation. That is trying to figure out if weaker random number generation at any point was prevalent...
- spiorf 5y agoIt did happen, and bitcoins were stolen. https://tradeblock.com/blog/javascript-random-number-flaw-leads-to-bitcoin-thefts/ https://tradeblock.com/blog/javascript-random-number-flaw-le...