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Is it possible ( novice with respect to blockchain here ) , to crack the wallet , with all the computing power of the bitcoin mining ?

tromp 3y ago
The computing power behind bitcoin mining is just computing gazillions of SHA256 hashes. Which is useless for recovering Satoshi's private key, as that requires solving the Discrete Logarithm Problem for Elliptic Curves. But even the amount of energy used in all Bitcoin mining falls short of the energy needed to solve a single instance of DLP using the best-known methods, by a factor greater than a billion billion.
drexlspivey 3y ago
No, otherwise miners would be cracking wallets instead of mining bitcoins
- lagniappe 3y ago
  They are. This is the foundation of the BTC collider project [0]. By the way, wallets do get cracked this way, but less through technical supremacy and more about brute force. [0] - https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about
  - drexlspivey 3y ago
    Afaik they haven't found anything except some puzzle coins being hidden behind increasing difficulty wallets. Only way they can crack a wallet is if the softwate generated the wallet uses some poor sources of entropy or has a vulnerability.
    - ryan-c 3y ago
      Yeah, regardless of whether you think bitcoin mining is a waste of electricity, those guys are definitely wasting electricity. The puzzle coins have faster-than-brute-force attacks available as an option.
ryan-c 3y ago
The computing power used for bitcoin mining is not general purpose, and cannot be used to crack keys.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
Although inconceivably impossible, there IS always a chance that two different nodes generate the same private key, which cryptographically precludes identical public/private keypairs... generated in earnest... at two separate locales. But this is MORE LIKELY than you brute-forcing the private key to a known public key. ---- Also, for technical accuracy... it's not just SHA-256 keys that drive bitcoin network. One of the reasons to "never re-use the same receiving address" is that different algos are used for a new-key-never-sent VS re-used-key . You are technically making the process "easier" by re-using the same private key to push a transaction. ---- <3 from your least favorite infamous bitcoin node operator

tromp 3y ago

The computing power behind bitcoin mining is just computing gazillions of SHA256 hashes. Which is useless for recovering Satoshi's private key, as that requires solving the Discrete Logarithm Problem for Elliptic Curves. But even the amount of energy used in all Bitcoin mining falls short of the energy needed to solve a single instance of DLP using the best-known methods, by a factor greater than a billion billion.

drexlspivey 3y ago

No, otherwise miners would be cracking wallets instead of mining bitcoins

lagniappe 3y ago
They are. This is the foundation of the BTC collider project [0]. By the way, wallets do get cracked this way, but less through technical supremacy and more about brute force. [0] - https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about
- drexlspivey 3y ago
  Afaik they haven't found anything except some puzzle coins being hidden behind increasing difficulty wallets. Only way they can crack a wallet is if the softwate generated the wallet uses some poor sources of entropy or has a vulnerability.
  - ryan-c 3y ago
    Yeah, regardless of whether you think bitcoin mining is a waste of electricity, those guys are definitely wasting electricity. The puzzle coins have faster-than-brute-force attacks available as an option.

ryan-c 3y ago

The computing power used for bitcoin mining is not general purpose, and cannot be used to crack keys.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago

Although inconceivably impossible, there IS always a chance that two different nodes generate the same private key, which cryptographically precludes identical public/private keypairs... generated in earnest... at two separate locales. But this is MORE LIKELY than you brute-forcing the private key to a known public key. ---- Also, for technical accuracy... it's not just SHA-256 keys that drive bitcoin network. One of the reasons to "never re-use the same receiving address" is that different algos are used for a new-key-never-sent VS re-used-key . You are technically making the process "easier" by re-using the same private key to push a transaction. ---- <3 from your least favorite infamous bitcoin node operator