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Back when I worked at Mozilla in 2012 a coworker excitedly explained Bitcoin to me and said that "someday the mining difficulty will be so high that it'll be mo

Back when I worked at Mozilla in 2012 a coworker excitedly explained Bitcoin to me and said that "someday the mining difficulty will be so high that it'll be more profitable to mine the keys protecting wallets than to mine new bitcoins". I don't think anyone could have thought far enough ahead to understand how much more trivial it would be than that. All those consumer gpus in now-illegal Chinese crypto farms are probably hard at work mining for keys. What else are you going to do with them? > these numbers radically come down when a determined adversary also has other large-scale computational assets at their disposal, such as a bitcoin mining operation that can coordinate the password-cracking activity across multiple powerful systems simultaneously. Yeah, and the best part is they already paid for the cards and can't use them for mining anymore because they're on their last leg and have been surpassed by newer generations of hardware. I'd bet a lot of the operations that got stinking rich five years ago are absolutely swimming in cards that they'd otherwise just be paying to get rid of. The ROI must be incredible, it's probably just a few hours to crack a key and you get to do a Storage Wars-style walkthrough of the secrets some poor LastPass user thought would be secure.

ronsor 3y ago
> All those consumer gpus in now-illegal Chinese crypto farms are probably hard at work mining for keys. What else are you going to do with them? No, they're still mining Bitcoin. There's absolutely no way to crack secp256k1 keys with even a datacenter GPU. We're firmly in the realm of quantum computers if you expect to crack anything before the heat death of the universe.
- px43 3y ago
  First off, GPUs haven't been used for mining Bitcoin for about a decade. There has been a lot of work being done to crack brainwallets, also there are a number of leaked/hacked/shared wallets that people are working on cracking. There have also been a number of wallets generated with weak RNGs which get cracked, vulgarity wallets etc, and of course, the LastPass vaults as described in the article.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  > There's absolutely no way to crack secp256k1 keys with even a datacenter GPU That's not what the article is implying is happening. > “An Nvidia 3090 can do roughly 4 million [password guesses] per second with 1000 iterations, but that would go down to 8 thousand per second with 500,000 iterations, which is why iteration count matters so much,” Weaver said. “So a combination of ‘not THAT strong of a password’ and ‘old vault’ and ‘low iteration count’ would make it theoretically crackable but real work, but the work is worth it given the targets.”
  - Grimburger 3y ago
    I think the signals got crossed here, they aren't cracking public key cryptography as noted by GP, they are cracking password hashes. You can find a lot of Hashcat benchmarks online giving you are rough idea of what current consumer hardware can do against argon2 or brcypt: https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb422222fd https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb4...
oefrha 3y ago
> What else are you going to do with them? They were sold, sometimes as new by unscrupulous vendors. Mining graphics cards flooding the market was a huge problem a few years ago.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  Some were. Surely not all of them.
Matl 3y ago
> All those consumer gpus in now-illegal Chinese crypto farms are probably hard at work mining for keys. What else are you going to do with them? Seems like quite the leapfrog there without substantive evidence, unless in today's America you can simply short circuit as long as there's 'Chinese' somewhere in there.
- JohnTHaller 3y ago
  The crypto farms are illegal due to a change in Chinese law. I'd wager it's mentioned because China had the largest set of mining on the planet before the CCP outlawed it. The most likely thing to happen to all of that GPU hardware would be to either dump it as used stock, which a lot of it has been, or to repurpose them. The only things to repurpose them to would be hacking or AI/BOINC/etc.
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  Or because it was a major news story when China banned Bitcoin mining in 2021 and the hash rate dropped 50%? Where do you think 50% of the global Bitcoin hash rate went almost overnight?

ronsor 3y ago

> All those consumer gpus in now-illegal Chinese crypto farms are probably hard at work mining for keys. What else are you going to do with them? No, they're still mining Bitcoin. There's absolutely no way to crack secp256k1 keys with even a datacenter GPU. We're firmly in the realm of quantum computers if you expect to crack anything before the heat death of the universe.

px43 3y ago
First off, GPUs haven't been used for mining Bitcoin for about a decade. There has been a lot of work being done to crack brainwallets, also there are a number of leaked/hacked/shared wallets that people are working on cracking. There have also been a number of wallets generated with weak RNGs which get cracked, vulgarity wallets etc, and of course, the LastPass vaults as described in the article.
bastawhiz 3y ago
> There's absolutely no way to crack secp256k1 keys with even a datacenter GPU That's not what the article is implying is happening. > “An Nvidia 3090 can do roughly 4 million [password guesses] per second with 1000 iterations, but that would go down to 8 thousand per second with 500,000 iterations, which is why iteration count matters so much,” Weaver said. “So a combination of ‘not THAT strong of a password’ and ‘old vault’ and ‘low iteration count’ would make it theoretically crackable but real work, but the work is worth it given the targets.”
- Grimburger 3y ago
  I think the signals got crossed here, they aren't cracking public key cryptography as noted by GP, they are cracking password hashes. You can find a lot of Hashcat benchmarks online giving you are rough idea of what current consumer hardware can do against argon2 or brcypt: https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb422222fd https://gist.github.com/Chick3nman/32e662a5bb63bc4f51b847bb4...

oefrha 3y ago

> What else are you going to do with them? They were sold, sometimes as new by unscrupulous vendors. Mining graphics cards flooding the market was a huge problem a few years ago.

bastawhiz 3y ago
Some were. Surely not all of them.

Matl 3y ago

> All those consumer gpus in now-illegal Chinese crypto farms are probably hard at work mining for keys. What else are you going to do with them? Seems like quite the leapfrog there without substantive evidence, unless in today's America you can simply short circuit as long as there's 'Chinese' somewhere in there.

JohnTHaller 3y ago
The crypto farms are illegal due to a change in Chinese law. I'd wager it's mentioned because China had the largest set of mining on the planet before the CCP outlawed it. The most likely thing to happen to all of that GPU hardware would be to either dump it as used stock, which a lot of it has been, or to repurpose them. The only things to repurpose them to would be hacking or AI/BOINC/etc.
bastawhiz 3y ago
Or because it was a major news story when China banned Bitcoin mining in 2021 and the hash rate dropped 50%? Where do you think 50% of the global Bitcoin hash rate went almost overnight?