6 ms·
I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
by bravoetch 1y ago
I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space.
- handfuloflight 1y agoIt's not zero. https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoIt's close enough. There are 200 million+ BTC wallets. They've found 54 out of 200 million+ or about 0.00002% of wallets - in how many years?
- handfuloflight 1y agoHow does the equation change with $100m of cloud or GPU compute as GP speculated? These are all hobbyists.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoIt changes that if you attempt to liquidate that much BTC, BTC crashes and you've got 90% less money than you hoped for.
- handfuloflight 1y agoDo you really think they have no notion of liquidity? Why would they attempt to liquidate it all at once?
- cj 1y agoThey could also do a private party transaction to sell the coins outside of an exchange, in order to hide the sale and also hide the price of the tokens sold. This is common practice in the stock market, called "dark pools" [0] > Dark pools came about primarily to facilitate block trading by institutional investors who did not wish to impact the markets with their large orders and obtain adverse prices for their trades. [0] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/introduction-dark-pools.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/050614/introdu...
- phil21 1y agoThe vast majority of BTC transactions are done this way. Anything of any size is traded via OTC desks or other more private avenues.
- usrusr 1y agoOutside, as in off the blockchain? That would mean that after the transaction, both sides would know the key to the wallet and there would be a race about who lights up a transaction first.
- cj 1y agoAfter the transaction, you can still send the bitcoin to the purchaser's wallet. But since the purchase itself happens off exchange, there's no record of how much the coins were sold for, so no impact on market price.
- sokoloff 1y agoA large wallet that’s been dormant for years suddenly becoming active will tend to pressure the price lower from the implied increase in liquid supply and fear that the wallet will continue to distribute coins. It’s not just the printing of transaction price that can affect the market.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoJust the fear of future liquidation would eventually severely crash BTC.
- handfuloflight 1y agoLike it's crashing now on this news?
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoThere's ~$188B in Satoshi era wallets. While ~$8B is huge news, due to the potential that all ~$188B might be in play, when most investors probably expected it was not prior to this - or at least the probability was low enough to barely factor, it's unlikely to crash BTC. Further, moving BTC is one thing. Showing signs of liquidation is another. That much should be able to get liquidated intelligently without moving the market.
- paulpauper 1y agoIt depends how it's sold. Market orders would have more impact than OTC .
- paulpauper 1y agoyeah, people think it's the selling that makes the price fall. it is the anticipation . markets are forward looking
- beefnugs 1y agoBecause maybe this isn't satoshi waking up, but finally those kidnappers hit that poor guy in the latest "we found satoshi" documentary
- paulpauper 1y agoif someone could brute force a key, they would target small inactive wallets , rather than big wallets and drawing attention to it
- nottrueatallz 1y agoNot true at all! Everyone knows there are holes in the crypto algorithms and implementations which agencies use to achieve any objective they may have. On top of that there are also holes across the software and hardware stacks of various implementations. Just because they run all the researchers and fund a lot of it does not mean there are no holes. Especially now with AI, I wouldn't be surprised if an amateur kicked a bunch of tires and got lucky. Just because they are not published, does not mean they are not using them, someone else found them and are using them. Or they just have the keys from back in the day. Can't wait to follow this story as it unfolds. The other risk is Quantum... That is going to be real fun when it starts making leaps above Moores Law. There needs to be a industry wide effort NOW! That researches and generates keys in unconventional ways, different than the ways they are being generated now. Because Quantum is a beast. Those keys will need to be Quantum proof, which means that even if the agent knows the algorithm that is used to generate the keys they cannot duplicate the keys that were generated the first instance it was run. Or you can start doing Hashing across fingerprint, eye and dna data. That is coming my folks!
- celticninja 1y agoYou dont understand bitcoin or the math or the cryptography ehind it.
- cluckindan 1y agoCan you look me in the eye and state that you understand Bitcoin and the math and the cryptography behind it? Even if you do, there could in theory still be a way to narrow down the key space or find some other shortcut to a wallet key, even if nobody has figured it out yet.
- celticninja 1y agoI understand the math and crypto behind it to a degree. I don't profess expert knowledge however. But I know enough to know the GP is wrong and I'm happy to point that out. If I thought there was any value in correcting GP claim by claim I would do so. But in reality it will just end up in me wasting my time trying to educate someone who doesn't want to be educated, and if they did they could go and research the math and cryptography for themselves. As someone once said, I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoIt would take approximately 6B H100 GPU days to crack every active BTC wallet. So if you had 10,000 H100s running, it'd only take ~1500 years. You'd have a high probability to find key in under ~1000 years, though. Even if I'm off by 3 orders of magnitude, it would take a decade and cost billions, and not make financial sense.
- paulpauper 1y agoActive addresses have less entropy too
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FabHK 1y agoWhy? Are you hypothesizing that they used bad RNGs?
- 1oooqooq 1y ago*at most ... years. People always forget those numbers are worst case scenarios. I mean, you can get luck on the very first guess too.
- relaxing 1y agoIf that’s the plan you can guess a number for free, no outlay needed.
- kelseyfrog 1y agoIf your guess is generated by a QRNG and many worlds is true, than one version of you is very happy although the expected value is 1.03×10−66 USD.
- FabHK 1y agoHow do you get that? BTC private key space is 256 bit. Let's say a billion wallets, that's 30 bits, so you need to check 226 bits to hit one wallet. A H100 does about 1000 TFLOPS at the very most, that's 10^15 or 50 bits per second (generously assuming we can check on key per FLOP). 6B days of that will give you an additional 50 bits (6 = 8 = 3 bits, B = 1000^3 = 30 bits, day = 10^5 seconds = 17 bits). Now we're talking 100 bits. But as discussed above, you need to check 220 bits to hit a key. There's still quite a gap. For comparison, the entire Bitcoin network (using 1% of world electricity) does about 1000 EH/s at the moment, that's 10^21 or 70 bits per second (so, roughly equivalent to a million of H100, using the rough overestimating sketch above). Per year, that's 70+25 = 95 bits. Still far.
- kristopolous 1y agoPeople are actively doing it. Mostly using clore.ai on their 4090x bundles. I used to work in the gpu rental space up to about a month ago. I talked to multiple people dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on looking for those keys. I'd put house odds at say 20:1 that someone cracked it over someone holding for 14 years and deciding now is strike time. Also if it's a true crack, then Bitcoin price could collapse swiftly if someone just snatched a wallet for 200k of compute or whatever. That's always been the real existential risk. I talked about it as the DES problem over a decade ago. Let's see if this is it
- adastra22 1y agoThose people were wasting their money. They could be running those GPUs from now until the end of the universe and still have approximately 0% chance of finding a single used key.
- kristopolous 1y agoRight. Those were the ones I talked to, just by random chance. It means that there are a lot of them. This implicates a few things - (1) people win the lottery every day and (2) it's highly unlikely that the best techniques are publicly known. Perhaps there's something that requires $1,000,000 in investment to yield a 1:100 chance of finding a particular targeted wallet using some clever shortcuts. The other explanation is very implausible: a human sits on wallets without splitting up the funds or derisking exposure, has wallets with a billion dollars sitting it in. Now I only have a few million, but even I have something like 6 brokerages and 12 banks. Even when I was a btc holder, I didn't keep over $100k in a single wallet. The snatching theory requires no new revolutionary math, no substantial breakthroughs, just some clever people with a lot of resources and a goal. Either explanation is speculative. I think the "lucky researchers at some University" theory is more likely then the "let's wait 14 years until this $1,000 becomes $1,000,000,000." Especially because (1) we're not exactly at some high water mark and (2) if this was just a person with a wallet trying to do something like pay for life's uncertainties, you can do basically 100% of that with like 4btc. However if you successfully snatched the wallet, you're on a clock before someone else gets it. This is exactly the kind of movement you'd be doing Also if some old bitcoiner comes out and says "hey that was me", we're still up in the air. If I had snatched a billion dollar wallet, the first thing I'd do is payoff an old btc'er to claim its there's to prevent market panic.
- amy214 1y ago>I would say the odds are zero because that's the likelihood of being able to brute-force anything in the key space. you are correct at first pass, but it's a fact wallets have been cracked many times, perhaps at least 100s of millions of dollars. The "keyspace" for the cracked wallet is a subset of the nominal keyspace - the much smaller space covered by either a flawed random number generator (RNG), or the whole brainwallet fiasco, or a RNG where a seed is crackable (e.g. milliseconds since 1970 or unix epoch - some cracks, whitehat, have used this method). That's all what we know in the whitehat space, surely other tricks exist in the blackhat space