Someone else could randomly guess your Bitcoin private key!

How hard is it to find a 256-bit digital signature or hash just by guessing and checking? What kind of computer would that take? This video attempts to get your head around the answer:

I found this image convincing years ago when I had the same question. https://miguelmoreno.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fYFBsqp.jpg

1 Like

That is why you don’t guess them, you steal them. But since you are only copying the key, is it stealing?

You can also look for flaws in the client software if you want someone else’s crypto currency.

If the keys are constantly under brute force attack, and the means to do so are always getting better, everyone who wants to keep their coins will have to use a service that adds a date related timestamp to it, i.e. normal key plus some formula using DDMMYYYY that is unique to you so its not easily guessable. You might get key+DDMMYYYY/3 rounded up, I might get DDMMYYYY*1.7 rounded down for a week then you get an encrypted email with the new formula to use for the week, etc. A major PITA I know.

I don’t think you really grasp how long and complex private keys are with bitcoin. adding a date modifier to it doesn’t really increase the complexity by more than a few orders of magnitude.

1 Like

Yeah I suppose. There has to be a solution, I don’t have a great one. If not the system is screwed!

No, no, what I’m saying is that the complexity is already a few orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the solar system.

I am yet unconvinced that quantum computing couldn’t reduce the time to brute force things by orders of magnitude that would make solving go from impossible to merely unlikely. The only entities at first to have such beyond known edge tech will be State actors.

oh sure, quantum computer could be a worry. So, you know. Just hang out and wait for quantum bitcoin. I’m pretty sure that’ll be pretty badass.

1 Like

It’s all about finding the weak points, not attacking the strong points.

Be interesting to see.

Now I can’t claim to fully understand blockchain programming, but are the differing cryptos at least solving differing equations to make their coins? Else I see a flaw where you can filter the Bitcoin ledger for numbers to use against later made alt-coins, or is there something I’m missing?

Some of them use the same algorithms, but the correct answer to the next block is also affected by the transactions in the previous block, so unless you have two blockchains that have identical transactions all the way back to the genesis block, no dice.

1 Like

cool stuff. Going to be interesting.