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Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

37 points by coinspin 5y ago

coinspin 5y ago
OP Here. I submitted this 6 months ago as a Show HN and thought I would try my luck again after adding a blog post last night about doing the same thing on AWS.
mritchie712 5y ago
Why is the “top” data as of Nov 12th?
- coinspin 5y ago
  I just haven't updated it lately. Thanks for the reminder. I'll run the scripts now.
  - mritchie712 5y ago
    Nice, just curious, how exactly are you updating it? I've been working on https://luabase.com/ https://luabase.com/ and started with Ethereum but plan to add bitcoin next.
    - coinspin 5y ago
      There's a blog post on the same site that talks about using https://github.com/in3rsha/bitcoin-utxo-dump https://github.com/in3rsha/bitcoin-utxo-dump. I'm running a pruned node, I use that lib to dump the address and balance to a csv and then I pull out the top 100 or so.
  - coinspin 5y ago
    Something is off with the output of parsing the utxos. I'll have to dig deeper into it later!
calrueb 5y ago
This is cool, and the linked Medium article helped me wrap my head around the security of Bitcoin wallets. I have wondered in the past why people mine blocks, but not try to “mine”/hack existing wallets. It would be cool to add a running counter for “X wallets checked” on the webpage.
- Cycl0ps 5y ago
  I was interested in the idea too and dug further into the math. Assuming you could check hashes at the same rate as Bitcoin is currently mined at that's 202 Exa-hashes per second. If you had the world's hashing power working on guessing private keys, the odds of getting one on any given day are 1/6.70093E45
  - coinspin 5y ago
    That's such a big number. I still fail at grasping really large numbers like that.
    - Cycl0ps 5y ago
      One Billion is 1.0E9, or a one followed by nine zeroes. so 6.0E45 is one billion to the power of 6, or six billion-billion-billion-billion-billion-billion, times six. At that point you can kind of just mad-libs each billion to be whatever you want "A billion Earths mining for a billion days, duplicated a billion times in a billion different simulated universes, and the odds of finding a hash after all that is still one in a billion, squared." Or you can plug it into Wolfram Alpha and get it to find a comparison, in this case 6E45 is 0.011% of all possible chess combinations. It does get worse than that though. A project I played with last year had me asking how many unique permutations there were for a 1920*1080 monitor. That number was around 10^10^77. I don't have any formal maths training and that one really threw me for a loop. To summarize 10^x means you have a number that's x digits long. So 10^6 means I have a six digit number. 10^10^x means that the number that describes how long my number is is x digits long. so 10^10^77 means that if I wanted to write out my number and count the number of zeros in it, that counting would give me a number 77 digits long. Math is weird.
DantesKite 5y ago
If by some ungodly miracle this correctly guesses a Bitcoin address, would you be notified?
- coinspin 5y ago
  Yeah. I would log it. It doesn't auto sweep the wallet or anything.
jtsiskin 5y ago
You can save a lot of CPU by just never querying the server, and just assume the balance is 0. I guarantee the experience will be identical
rkagerer 5y ago
You might also be interested in the Large Bitcoin Collider. It found some weakly generated private keys.
ourbetterworld 5y ago
I made something similar for Ethereum keys :) I decided I wanted mine to be an art presentation too: http://petroff.ryan.gitlab.io/ethkeyscape/ http://petroff.ryan.gitlab.io/ethkeyscape/
api 5y ago
Not sure if the Sun will remain a main sequence star long enough for this to work...

37 points by coinspin 5y ago

OP Here. I submitted this 6 months ago as a Show HN and thought I would try my luck again after adding a blog post last night about doing the same thing on AWS.

mritchie712 5y ago

Why is the “top” data as of Nov 12th?

coinspin 5y ago
I just haven't updated it lately. Thanks for the reminder. I'll run the scripts now.
- mritchie712 5y ago
  Nice, just curious, how exactly are you updating it? I've been working on https://luabase.com/ https://luabase.com/ and started with Ethereum but plan to add bitcoin next.
  - coinspin 5y ago
    There's a blog post on the same site that talks about using https://github.com/in3rsha/bitcoin-utxo-dump https://github.com/in3rsha/bitcoin-utxo-dump. I'm running a pruned node, I use that lib to dump the address and balance to a csv and then I pull out the top 100 or so.
- coinspin 5y ago
  Something is off with the output of parsing the utxos. I'll have to dig deeper into it later!

calrueb 5y ago

This is cool, and the linked Medium article helped me wrap my head around the security of Bitcoin wallets. I have wondered in the past why people mine blocks, but not try to “mine”/hack existing wallets. It would be cool to add a running counter for “X wallets checked” on the webpage.

Cycl0ps 5y ago
I was interested in the idea too and dug further into the math. Assuming you could check hashes at the same rate as Bitcoin is currently mined at that's 202 Exa-hashes per second. If you had the world's hashing power working on guessing private keys, the odds of getting one on any given day are 1/6.70093E45
- coinspin 5y ago
  That's such a big number. I still fail at grasping really large numbers like that.
  - Cycl0ps 5y ago
    One Billion is 1.0E9, or a one followed by nine zeroes. so 6.0E45 is one billion to the power of 6, or six billion-billion-billion-billion-billion-billion, times six. At that point you can kind of just mad-libs each billion to be whatever you want "A billion Earths mining for a billion days, duplicated a billion times in a billion different simulated universes, and the odds of finding a hash after all that is still one in a billion, squared." Or you can plug it into Wolfram Alpha and get it to find a comparison, in this case 6E45 is 0.011% of all possible chess combinations. It does get worse than that though. A project I played with last year had me asking how many unique permutations there were for a 1920*1080 monitor. That number was around 10^10^77. I don't have any formal maths training and that one really threw me for a loop. To summarize 10^x means you have a number that's x digits long. So 10^6 means I have a six digit number. 10^10^x means that the number that describes how long my number is is x digits long. so 10^10^77 means that if I wanted to write out my number and count the number of zeros in it, that counting would give me a number 77 digits long. Math is weird.

DantesKite 5y ago

If by some ungodly miracle this correctly guesses a Bitcoin address, would you be notified?

coinspin 5y ago
Yeah. I would log it. It doesn't auto sweep the wallet or anything.

jtsiskin 5y ago

You can save a lot of CPU by just never querying the server, and just assume the balance is 0. I guarantee the experience will be identical

rkagerer 5y ago

You might also be interested in the Large Bitcoin Collider. It found some weakly generated private keys.

ourbetterworld 5y ago

I made something similar for Ethereum keys :) I decided I wanted mine to be an art presentation too: http://petroff.ryan.gitlab.io/ethkeyscape/ http://petroff.ryan.gitlab.io/ethkeyscape/

api 5y ago

Not sure if the Sun will remain a main sequence star long enough for this to work...