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> If they lost the keys(as in, lost the wallet.dat with the keys in it) and were able to generate a valid private key given only a public bitcoin address... bit

> If they lost the keys(as in, lost the wallet.dat with the keys in it) and were able to generate a valid private key given only a public bitcoin address... bitcoin is dead, game over, pack it up. Yeah. This wouldn't be a fail on the MTGox league; this would be a "Satoshi Nakamoto and all the cryptographers who took a look at the code failed". Cracking a wallet is supposed to be something that requires the resources of a state-sized entity.

FatalLogic 13y ago
>Cracking a wallet is supposed to be something that requires the resources of a state-sized entity. A galaxy-sized entity, maybe? The only known way to find a private key from a public key is brute force. That's way beyond the abilities of a state, unless they've made a massive breakthrough in quantum computing. http://i.imgur.com/fYFBsqp.jpg http://i.imgur.com/fYFBsqp.jpg
- nullc 13y ago
  Obpedantry: In theory rho allows you to recover private keys with work-factor 2^128 (times some small constant depending on how much storage you wish to use), which is significantly less than the 2^256 you might expect from "brute force". Still completely infeasible.
  - teraflop 13y ago
    But first you have to obtain the public key by finding a preimage of the SHA-256-hashed address. And SHA-256 (with the full number of rounds) currently has no known preimage attacks that are even marginally better than brute force.
- brohee 13y ago
  Not in a flawed PRNG was used. Lets not forget we talk custom wallet implementation here...