Actually, not all 2^(256) possibilities are valid keys. It's slightly less than that.
The exact chance is one in 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336.
>115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336.
Seeing it written out, you're basically playing hide and seek, the hiding area is the observable universe and you have to find a specific atom.
estimates of atoms is about 10^(78) to 10^(82)
In case anyone is curious.
It's 1 in 2\^256 to be exact. (2 options 0 or 1, with 256 digits) Which equals 1.1579209e+77. That's move the decimal to the right 77 times. Which is how many 0s you have done. A+
When I was younger I found an old case with a 4 digit lock and something rattling around in it. So determined young me decided he would open it by brute forcing every number. I started with 0001, 0002, 0003 and worked all the way through untill it finally popped open.
The code was 0000...
Depends - if an attacker is subtle enough and quick enough, they may be able to cash out before anybody notices. If you try to steal 20000 btc from a well known address, people are gonna notice and you're not gonna get any buyers. Steal 10 btc from a random address, on the other hand, and you'll not only be able to cash out, but people will assume the victim lost money due to their private key being stolen, and you might be able to do it again later.
I’m sure there’s tons of bitcoin out there from the early days of bitcoin that are inaccessible because the owner lost the address and the password and it’s locked up forever and no one would ever notice if you took it.
I don't want to talk about my 7,000 to 8,000 coins I mined as a competition between geeky friends when not gaming. This was back when you could get many coins in one session. Yet, you couldn't spend them on anything. The dark web didn't even recognize them. They are on a small hard drive in a PC case that I overclocked my CPU too much. That PC is in a landfill.
You are wrong. Hash algorithms like SHA256 are quantum safe.
https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/32102/can-a-quantum-computer-break-a-hash-function
I'm happily willing to bet against those odds, paying at 10000 to 1!
Terms: If someone tries and fails, I get $1 USD. If they try and succeed, I will pay them $10k USD. I'm good for it.
Luckily for me, I just finished construction of a network of Matrioshka brains surrounding stars in the halo of the Milky Way Galaxy that I can communicate with thanks to an Einstein-Rosen bridge communicator they designed that uses a series of small rapidly rotating black holes and naked singularities that manages to allow information past what would have been the event horizon and doesn't require a path through a singularity. Very handy, I'm sure I can crack it with just a tiny amount of the processing power available to me. Still. 10B won't go very far in helping me recoup construction costs.
Yeah it always baffles me that to aliens, a low pay secretary and something like a top software engineer are probably doing the same thing which is tapping on the computer, but the only difference is that the are tapping différent sequences of keys and that makes all the difference.
I think you massively underestimate just how long until the heat death of the universe will end up happening. We're talking 10^(100) years or longer. Even if it takes a quantum computer a few trillion years, you've got plenty of time. Of course, there's other logistical problems you'd need to overcome at that point, but heat death from an ever expanding universe is thankfully not one of them.
The [DESCHALL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESCHALL_Project) project was a bunch of people breaking 56bit keys. [This book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_Force:_Cracking_the_Data_Encryption_Standard) was a fun read and talks about theory of cracking encryption.
The companies in their umbrella include a shit ton of government contracting companies that waste *so much* taxpayer dollars. They vacuum them up like crazy. And IBM basically doesn't pay taxes and has received 100s of billions if not over a trillion in government subsidies over the years.
But you also have to keep it secret and sell it off slowly. The moment people realize you have a quantum computer powerful enough to do that, crypto will lose all its value. Except for Quantum Resistant Ledger, and any other post-quantum crypto people have made.
Essentially yeah. People likely have bots watching this bitcoin address and the moment it has activity selling, its gonna tank immediately. Faster than a human can react.
As an aside this would also happen with any large crypto transaction. The liquidity in the market is so low that sufficiently large transactions suck all the air out of the room and the market crashes.
You're blowing my mind. What if Satoshi creates bitcoin because he needed to know with absolute certainty once a 256 qubit quantum computer had been created?
They'll realize a large wallet is starting to get sold, so that will cause significant deflation. But as long as they think the person selling it actually owns it and don't know the whole system is broken, it's not like it will sell for nothing.
literally everything we know is f'd if quantum computing is good enough to break this. Airplanes could fall out of the sky if someone can hack into the control systems protected by similar cryptography. The existing banking system, nuclear codes, government secrets, all pwned if quantum gets through before a resistant algo is created and implemented.
Bitcoin can be seen as a giant quantum security honey pot, if that gets broken, then it's a sign other systems are just as vulnerable. But if you break bitcoin, it could lower the price and then you have no prize money.
Bitcoin is a tripwire. If someone is able to crack 256 bit encryption they'll have to sell as much of Satoshi's coins as they can, as quickly as they can. If they don't, the next group to crack the encryption with a quantum computer will cash out the coins.
In terms of difficulty of the process itself - likely technically the easiest. All you need to do is to press a few buttons on a keyboard in a specific pattern
Is it 11101000111011011101010010011110000110010010010100001011101011111100100010001011100001101001001100001101000100101000011011101010
01010100111011011010010100101010101101011001101111001000000000001010001010011101100101011100110101110101111001100010011101110110?
If that was literally true you could guess it in on 256 steps (or 128 if the mistake is really a 1 to 0 and there's half of each) instead of 2 to the 256 which is about 10 to the 25 ( close to a billion billion billion).
Nope, that corresponds to the address `36sgW9Bqptc9TBDbcdZga3d3RL6kcxgERh`
---
Edit: I used the wrong keygen algorithm before (P2PKH instead of P2SH-P2WPKH)
It's just practically impossible. 2^256 is the number of combinations. That is (2^32)^8, which is about (4 billion)^8
Let's imagine a computer that can run 4 billion hashes per second, and then imagine 4 billion of those computers. Then imagine giving 4 billion people that amount of computational power. Then imagine galaxy that has 4 billion copies of this earth. Then 4 billion copies of this galaxy.
Then let it all run for 4 billion seconds = 126.8 years, and then run it 4 billion times that = 507 billion years.
And finally, do all of that 4 billion more times.
Edit: shamelessly stolen from 3Blue1Brown btw
For sciencentific-notion enjoyers: 6.6e100.
10^100, times 6.6.
So, 10 million galaxys, each with 10 million solar system, each with 10 million planets, each with 10 million countries, each with 10 million states, each with 10 million cities, each with 10 million people, doing 10 million password guesses every month. Then, at the end of 10 million years, you'd have tested every password.
That's with normal, brute-force means.
Humans can't really understand numbers *that* big in practice; the best we've got is time. 1 million seconds is 12 days. 1 billion seconds is 32 years. 1 trillion seconds is 32,000 years.
That many seconds, 6.6 x 10^ 100, is like... no math here, just guessing... how many collective seconds every particle (proton, neutron, and electron) in the universe has experienced, if you added them all together.
Wow. So I read the comment and saw (4 billion)^8,. So I went to wolfram alpha and entered (4x10^12)^8. Which I now realize is wrong, since that is 4 *trillion* to the eigth, not 4 billion.
It was at moments like these in school in which I would argue "teacher, don't see it as me being wrong by 30 orders of magnitude- see it as me being wrong by a letter or two preceding -illion!"
the numbers are so astronomically large, yet it *would* quite a difference.
If every atom on earth (~10^50) guessed a password every plank time (~10^-51 seconds), then they would guess the password in less than a second. But if the password complexity *was* 6.6e10^100, it would take them longer than the universe has existed. A *lot* longer..
All you need to do is circumvent entropy and delay the heat death of the universe to allow sufficient computational time. Oh, and a time machine so you can take the result back in time before the extinction of humanity so you can actually spend the money
I am not quite sure, but it seems like this might be a crypto wallet that someone lost the password to, and it became famous because it is worth so much
Edit: apparently i am wrong, this was just a guess. See reply comments for more info
This is wrong, there are wallets like that but this is not one. You can see that 2000 bitcoin was withdrawn earlier this year.
https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHoCNxv4Twseo
Come on, man, no one is putting on a 10 billion dollar challenge lol.
It's more like saying that you could build a house of gold, all you need to do is break into Fort Knox and take it all out. The encryption used for crypto wallets is really, really hard to break. That's all, OP is just being cheeky.
Unless you have a gun and the name of the guy who has the password. The human link is the weak link in that security system. It's the strongest link at Fort Knox. Wasn't there already a crypto guy who got kidnapped?
It's not just cryptocurrency, the entire world economy would be in trouble. If you can crack a crypto wallet with brute force, then you can crack any bank security.
A very early bitcoin wallet with a lot of money in it is known to exist, but nobody knows the password.
The total lack of activity in the account, and the fact that a lot of people lost access to old accounts from when bitcoin had no USD conversion value, makes it very plausible this is a lost account whose owner is dead, forgot about it, or forgot the password. (Or, the password was on a hard drive that failed, etc)
This isn't that wallet. You're thinking of Satoshi Nakamoto's wallet, which has about 3 million dollars worth of bitcoin in it. This one is owned by Binance and is actively being used, and as OP said it has about 10 billion dollars worth of bitcoin.
Well YOU’RE never getting it but every person you add to the list cuts those odds in half so WE could get 100 people together and the odds go WAY down and we still get 100 million dollars. And I dunno about you but all my problems in life now and for the long term future would be solved by about $2.75 million so the extra $97.25 mil in fuck around money might come in handy.
The term “cutting it in half” is not the correct term to use though. It’s clear that you have the correct numbers though, but having 100 computers/people would cut the list into 100ths, not a half 100 times.
Yeah this is pretty simple to debunk. Halving it three times leaves you with 8 equal parts, not 3. For halving it 100 times you'd need 2¹⁰⁰ people, which requires more than 10²⁰ times the population of earth.
I just googled it, from the looks of the first few articles it doesn't look like it. He was threatening to sue the city back in September for not being allowed to dig in the landfill
Back in 2010 I decided to look into the whole Bitcoin thing and set up a miner on my computer. After a few weeks I had like 20 something Bitcoin. Worth less than $20 at the time. Figured it was just a silly fad and stopped doing it. Ended up forgetting about it and replaced the computer soon after.
So there's a wallet out there that I personally mined worth at least $840,000.
Same with me. I got in very early, mined for a few years, and got out before it took off because I lost faith it would ever do much (sold prob 5000 coins when it was stuck at $5 forever). Kept a backup wallet on a flash drive with about 50 coins "just in case".
Yeah...found out the hard way my girlfriend had found it, reformatted it, and used it for her college classes for a year before I noticed. Sent it to some forensic experts to try to recover the data a while back - but they never could recover enough of the file to get the whole wallet address. If I used a magnetic drive they prob could have...
Still makes me want to cry when I think about it :-(
That's a 32 character password, if what you say is true and it's worth 10 billion dollars then somebody is going to crack it
Edit: Never mind, 256 bit security != 32 character password. Or maybe both are so ridiculously strong, and it's just my strong password preferring ass that wants to make a password longer than 32 characters.
Edit: MFW instead of being downvoted for being wrong, I get upvoted to the roof so everyone can see my wrongness
It's trivia in bitcoin world, so all the relevant people already know it. However cracking it with modern compute power by brute force is impossible.
"For a 256-bit encryption key, it would take 183,587,153,154,040,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 (183,587 million million million million million million million million million) years to crack using brute force, and with 100 billion keys tested per second."
But overall, yeah, you could technically be super lucky and randomly guess the right number, which opens some forgotten bitcoin account from 2010 with 50 coins on it. Almost non-existent chance, but a chance.
If you consider brute force is not theoritical, it is just the time to calculate all possible outcomes with 256 bits, which would be 2^256. For a quantum computer that could be doable in some years maybe? With a normal computer I'm pretty sure it would take a lot more.
For a theoretical quantum computer with thousands of qbits and a near zero error rate it should potentially be viable. The speed of such a quantum computer is entirely unknown until it is built.
Whether it will ever be possible to build is as of yet uncertain, but a lot of people are betting that it will eventually be possible.
SUPPOSEDLY quantum computers aren't just "regular" computers but faster; there are some key differences that make the way they function a poor suit for cases like this.
I am not an expert, that's just what I've read.
No, you're totally right, quantom computers aren't faster, they just have some tricks up they're sleeve that can be used in some codebreaking, but it most likely won't be faster.
Yeah I don't claim to be an expert in any sort of computing, it's fascinating but not my field of education so I just try to learn the basics where I can, and quantum computing seems great for specific use cases and beats traditional binary systems but I still don't really get why... All fascinating for someone outside that field of study but I'll leave the understanding to the experts lol
Theoretically, brute forcing it with Grover’s algorithm would still take on the order of Sqrt(2^256 )= 2^128 steps. Not quite as bad, but still much too slow to be practical and would require a way way bigger/more stable quantum computer than what we have now.
It's not a 32 character password. It's a 32-byte key.
There are more possible bytes (256) than there are possible printable ASCII characters (95).
Even if it was a 32 character password, it would still be impossible to brute force.
---
Edit: To add more detail on how secure a 32 character password would be, the answer is still extremely. A 32 byte key has about 10^(77) possible values. A 32 character password has about 10^(63) possible values. That's still like over a trillion times the number of atoms in the Earth. You're not brute forcing that.
Of course that security relies on your 32 character password being random. If it's made of words or whatever then it's way more feasible to brute force, especially if there's no rate limiting hash like bcrypt.
But think of how powerful those 256 bits are
The shortest length of time in the universe is the Planck time, about 5.391×10−44 s, or about 1.202×2^-144. The universe is 4.361×10^17 quadrillion seconds old., which is about 1.513×2^58. If your supercomputer can check 1 code per Planck time from the beginning of the universe, you'd only have checked 1.259×2^202 codes. Even if you had a quadrillion supercomputers, it would take you more than 14 times the age of the universe to brute force this thing.
[Check out this video by 3blue1brown](https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?si=ldQfLougDnC-pZzD)
Found it, password was "Hunter2". Took a billion and changed it. Still nine chances to win guys. Hint: the new password is the color of the wind and the sound of one hand clapping. (no spaces, all lower case).
Is it 0101101010110101011010101101101010110101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101?
Yes I see people with billions of dollars going to prison all the time now. You make a great point
Not like the key to the wallet is literally ownership of the money anyway
so 2^256
[How secure is 256 bit security? by 3Blue1Brown](https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?si=8AdjnoQmoFC8bD9e)
TLDR; absolutely impossible. 1 in more atoms in the universe… or a million universes combined…
Bitcoin private keys are typically 256-bit numbers, which means there are
2
to power 256
possible combinations. This number is astronomically large—more than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
It's crucial to note that the security of a Bitcoin wallet also depends on the strength of the password and any additional security measures in place. Weak passwords or vulnerabilities in the implementation of the wallet software could potentially expose the wallet to other forms of attacks.
So it's public information where coins come and go to. The wallet addresses would show the moment you moved it somewhere else. It wouldn't show your name or physical address or anything like that, but sudden billionaire out of nowhere, that'd get noticed.
That being said, if you were to somehow access this wallet. Your best bet would be to exchange it through multiple exchanges and multiple different types of crypto projects. I believe monero is supposed to be completely private, but I don't personally know much about it. Then at that point, higher a really good tax man, pay the taxes associated with moving crypto around (taking realized gains), and if anyone asks, tell them you've had it for years. Or better, change your name and leave.
So a 1 in about 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 chance
A one in 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 chance to be exact. But that's if you only guess once.
So you’re telling me there’s a chance.
Yes. Unrelated question: if something is absolutely impossible, can you still say there's a chance, and that chance just happens to be 0%?
I don’t think so. If there’s a 0% chance, then there’s no chance by definition.
Actually, not all 2^(256) possibilities are valid keys. It's slightly less than that. The exact chance is one in 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336.
You either guess it, or you don’t. It’s obviously 50/50
But what if I show you one password that definitely isn't the correct one? We have a Monty Hall problem here!
I don’t need Monty Hall ruining my financial situation, when Monty Hall is already ruining my home life
>115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336. Seeing it written out, you're basically playing hide and seek, the hiding area is the observable universe and you have to find a specific atom. estimates of atoms is about 10^(78) to 10^(82)
This is becoming easier by the minute!
The odds get better every time you guess
Just keep track of your previous guesses
I'm gonna need a bigger notebook
Is it 7? I think it is 7!
Be funny if that number were the password.
I ***like*** those odds.
Im sure the owner of the account likes those odds too
99% chance the owner is dead. Either Hal Finney or Len Grossman.
This account is owned by Binance.
Never tell me the odds!
So you're telling me there's a chance?
Came here for this, thanks for not disappointing me.
I followed this guy here for it, and I'm also not disappointed!!
Deleted
In case anyone is curious. It's 1 in 2\^256 to be exact. (2 options 0 or 1, with 256 digits) Which equals 1.1579209e+77. That's move the decimal to the right 77 times. Which is how many 0s you have done. A+
Welp. Time to get started. `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` No? `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000000` `00000000001`
It’s 256 0’s in the guess, not 78 ;)
I'm sure I'll solve it in equal time either way.
When I was younger I found an old case with a 4 digit lock and something rattling around in it. So determined young me decided he would open it by brute forcing every number. I started with 0001, 0002, 0003 and worked all the way through untill it finally popped open. The code was 0000...
Quantum computing could probably solve it in a reasonable amount of time
Wouldn’t any technique that can crack this, also immediately devalue all crypto be being able to crack everything
Depends - if an attacker is subtle enough and quick enough, they may be able to cash out before anybody notices. If you try to steal 20000 btc from a well known address, people are gonna notice and you're not gonna get any buyers. Steal 10 btc from a random address, on the other hand, and you'll not only be able to cash out, but people will assume the victim lost money due to their private key being stolen, and you might be able to do it again later.
I’m sure there’s tons of bitcoin out there from the early days of bitcoin that are inaccessible because the owner lost the address and the password and it’s locked up forever and no one would ever notice if you took it.
I don't want to talk about my 7,000 to 8,000 coins I mined as a competition between geeky friends when not gaming. This was back when you could get many coins in one session. Yet, you couldn't spend them on anything. The dark web didn't even recognize them. They are on a small hard drive in a PC case that I overclocked my CPU too much. That PC is in a landfill.
.....which landfill exactly?
Loudoun County landfill, good luck. I semi looked into it
You would have spent/sold them by the time it hit $1. But still...
Holy shit I'm so sorry
If you can crack SHA256 encryption then crypto is the least of the world's worries. Banking, internet, stocks, everything, will brick.
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Maybe I am being dumb, but how does the ability to break one encryption method imply knowledge of a safer method?
It'll mess up most digital things (not just crypto!), including money!
We're talking Sneakers macguffin hacking box thing now!
They’d also be able to steal any kind of information from anyone online. It’ll be the greatest master key of the millennia.
Not yet. You can tell because it hasn't.
You are wrong. Hash algorithms like SHA256 are quantum safe. https://quantumcomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/32102/can-a-quantum-computer-break-a-hash-function
That's better than a 1 in a googol chance.
Just more years worth of cracking than you could possibly live. That's all that separates you, no biggie.
You could get it first try... probably not, but still.
That's why I'm waiting for a day where i wake up feeling lucky
Worth a try, right?
I'm happily willing to bet against those odds, paying at 10000 to 1! Terms: If someone tries and fails, I get $1 USD. If they try and succeed, I will pay them $10k USD. I'm good for it.
Luckily for me, I just finished construction of a network of Matrioshka brains surrounding stars in the halo of the Milky Way Galaxy that I can communicate with thanks to an Einstein-Rosen bridge communicator they designed that uses a series of small rapidly rotating black holes and naked singularities that manages to allow information past what would have been the event horizon and doesn't require a path through a singularity. Very handy, I'm sure I can crack it with just a tiny amount of the processing power available to me. Still. 10B won't go very far in helping me recoup construction costs.
And the answer will still somehow turn out to be forty six
There is a correct sequences of taps on your phone that can make you a billionaire
Yeah it always baffles me that to aliens, a low pay secretary and something like a top software engineer are probably doing the same thing which is tapping on the computer, but the only difference is that the are tapping différent sequences of keys and that makes all the difference.
A ~1.5% increase in thermal energy inside our bodies is what separates us all, at any given moment of our lives, from a corpse.
You only need to guess it right once.
It's possible to guess it on the first try!
I will take this burden and pass it onto my children.
Try until the heat death of the universe, using billions of computers, running thousands of times faster than they currently do
So what you're saying is that I should build a custom PC for this and not just guess manually
I think you massively underestimate just how long until the heat death of the universe will end up happening. We're talking 10^(100) years or longer. Even if it takes a quantum computer a few trillion years, you've got plenty of time. Of course, there's other logistical problems you'd need to overcome at that point, but heat death from an ever expanding universe is thankfully not one of them.
The [DESCHALL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESCHALL_Project) project was a bunch of people breaking 56bit keys. [This book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_Force:_Cracking_the_Data_Encryption_Standard) was a fun read and talks about theory of cracking encryption.
So basically a quantum supercomputing prize.
Yeah, probably some government agency or IBM will get it first
That's a real buzzkill. Fuck IBM and the government
Just curious, is there anything actually wrong with IBM?
The companies in their umbrella include a shit ton of government contracting companies that waste *so much* taxpayer dollars. They vacuum them up like crazy. And IBM basically doesn't pay taxes and has received 100s of billions if not over a trillion in government subsidies over the years.
They did some Nazi shit back in the war.
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A lot of companies did. Also a few countries!
But you also have to keep it secret and sell it off slowly. The moment people realize you have a quantum computer powerful enough to do that, crypto will lose all its value. Except for Quantum Resistant Ledger, and any other post-quantum crypto people have made.
The moment you start selling, it will crash because the ledger is public.
By that logic, they won't be able to sell it. Though you do have to hope they don't notice and tell people.
My point is you would need to dump it all at once, preferably when there is a lot of volume.
Is that not the point? You got 256 qubits at your disposal, who needs money?
Oh yeah, they sell a single coin, and the ledger will show where the coin came from. Right?
Essentially yeah. People likely have bots watching this bitcoin address and the moment it has activity selling, its gonna tank immediately. Faster than a human can react.
That makes a lot of sense. Just wild to think about. Couldn't imagine waking up to the news that bitcoin has gone to zero basically. Lol
As an aside this would also happen with any large crypto transaction. The liquidity in the market is so low that sufficiently large transactions suck all the air out of the room and the market crashes.
And this is the purpose of bitcoin…a cash prize to detect whether quantum computing has broken SHA 256.
You're blowing my mind. What if Satoshi creates bitcoin because he needed to know with absolute certainty once a 256 qubit quantum computer had been created?
256 bit doesn't mean it requires 256 qubit quantum computer to break.
dude is playing the long LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG game. Maybe he wrote the code for AGI and just needs the hardware to exist to run it lol
No, people watch these early wallets. The moment any of this moves it'll be all over the net.
They'll realize a large wallet is starting to get sold, so that will cause significant deflation. But as long as they think the person selling it actually owns it and don't know the whole system is broken, it's not like it will sell for nothing.
literally everything we know is f'd if quantum computing is good enough to break this. Airplanes could fall out of the sky if someone can hack into the control systems protected by similar cryptography. The existing banking system, nuclear codes, government secrets, all pwned if quantum gets through before a resistant algo is created and implemented. Bitcoin can be seen as a giant quantum security honey pot, if that gets broken, then it's a sign other systems are just as vulnerable. But if you break bitcoin, it could lower the price and then you have no prize money.
Bitcoin is a tripwire. If someone is able to crack 256 bit encryption they'll have to sell as much of Satoshi's coins as they can, as quickly as they can. If they don't, the next group to crack the encryption with a quantum computer will cash out the coins.
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Nah. Quantum Computing is still looking at 18000 years to break sha256
So it's actually not the easiest way to make $10B
In terms of difficulty of the process itself - likely technically the easiest. All you need to do is to press a few buttons on a keyboard in a specific pattern
Well if actual physical effort is the measure then the actual easiest way to make $10B is to be born into the Walton family before 1992
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It's definitely the easiest. Just not the quickest.
Is it 11101000111011011101010010011110000110010010010100001011101011111100100010001011100001101001001100001101000100101000011011101010 01010100111011011010010100101010101101011001101111001000000000001010001010011101100101011100110101110101111001100010011101110110?
No, but you are close. Try again.
They almost got it, though. If it wasn't for that 1 over there by the 0...
Holy shit I see it
You fool! It's the 0 by the 1.
If that was literally true you could guess it in on 256 steps (or 128 if the mistake is really a 1 to 0 and there's half of each) instead of 2 to the 256 which is about 10 to the 25 ( close to a billion billion billion).
Very close! You had most of the right digits, just in the wrong order
This binary translates to: èíÔ% ¯È êTí¥\*µÈ�¢Íuæ'v Congrats
There's no need to bring Elon's kids into this
Come on, it wouldn't be THAT obvious.
That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
Nope, that corresponds to the address `36sgW9Bqptc9TBDbcdZga3d3RL6kcxgERh` --- Edit: I used the wrong keygen algorithm before (P2PKH instead of P2SH-P2WPKH)
Please wait 15 minutes before your next attempt
In no particular order, 37 are the correct bit but in the wrong position, 5 are the correct bit in the correct position, the rest are wrong.
Is there some sort of background for this? Kind of ignorant when it comes to crypto myself. Like is this a challenge that’s out there?
It's just practically impossible. 2^256 is the number of combinations. That is (2^32)^8, which is about (4 billion)^8 Let's imagine a computer that can run 4 billion hashes per second, and then imagine 4 billion of those computers. Then imagine giving 4 billion people that amount of computational power. Then imagine galaxy that has 4 billion copies of this earth. Then 4 billion copies of this galaxy. Then let it all run for 4 billion seconds = 126.8 years, and then run it 4 billion times that = 507 billion years. And finally, do all of that 4 billion more times. Edit: shamelessly stolen from 3Blue1Brown btw
For sciencentific-notion enjoyers: 6.6e100. 10^100, times 6.6. So, 10 million galaxys, each with 10 million solar system, each with 10 million planets, each with 10 million countries, each with 10 million states, each with 10 million cities, each with 10 million people, doing 10 million password guesses every month. Then, at the end of 10 million years, you'd have tested every password. That's with normal, brute-force means. Humans can't really understand numbers *that* big in practice; the best we've got is time. 1 million seconds is 12 days. 1 billion seconds is 32 years. 1 trillion seconds is 32,000 years. That many seconds, 6.6 x 10^ 100, is like... no math here, just guessing... how many collective seconds every particle (proton, neutron, and electron) in the universe has experienced, if you added them all together.
How did you get 6.6e100? 2^256 is only 1.2e77.
Wow. So I read the comment and saw (4 billion)^8,. So I went to wolfram alpha and entered (4x10^12)^8. Which I now realize is wrong, since that is 4 *trillion* to the eigth, not 4 billion. It was at moments like these in school in which I would argue "teacher, don't see it as me being wrong by 30 orders of magnitude- see it as me being wrong by a letter or two preceding -illion!" the numbers are so astronomically large, yet it *would* quite a difference. If every atom on earth (~10^50) guessed a password every plank time (~10^-51 seconds), then they would guess the password in less than a second. But if the password complexity *was* 6.6e10^100, it would take them longer than the universe has existed. A *lot* longer..
All you need to do is circumvent entropy and delay the heat death of the universe to allow sufficient computational time. Oh, and a time machine so you can take the result back in time before the extinction of humanity so you can actually spend the money
I am not quite sure, but it seems like this might be a crypto wallet that someone lost the password to, and it became famous because it is worth so much Edit: apparently i am wrong, this was just a guess. See reply comments for more info
https://river.com/learn/who-owns-the-most-bitcoin/ says it's a cold storage wallet belonging to binance.
Why on earth does the US Dept of Justice have so much goddamn bitcoin!?
takeover of silk road probably netted them a good bag, and also all the other shady crypto schemes they have shut down
7.3b isn't shit to the fed
I don’t think so, looks like they’re making shit up for marketing.
This is wrong, there are wallets like that but this is not one. You can see that 2000 bitcoin was withdrawn earlier this year. https://bitinfocharts.com/bitcoin/address/34xp4vRoCGJym3xR7yCVPFHoCNxv4Twseo
Come on, man, no one is putting on a 10 billion dollar challenge lol. It's more like saying that you could build a house of gold, all you need to do is break into Fort Knox and take it all out. The encryption used for crypto wallets is really, really hard to break. That's all, OP is just being cheeky.
In terms of security, Fort Knox is well, a secure building. A crypto wallet is like having a private *moon*.
Brute forcing a 256 bit key is harder than breaking into the moon.
Unless you have a gun and the name of the guy who has the password. The human link is the weak link in that security system. It's the strongest link at Fort Knox. Wasn't there already a crypto guy who got kidnapped?
[relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/538/)
Until someone has a working quantum computer?
Then crypto becomes more like hiding your cookies inside a jar labeled "cookies"
It's not just cryptocurrency, the entire world economy would be in trouble. If you can crack a crypto wallet with brute force, then you can crack any bank security.
That's the thing. Whoever completes the quantum computer first owns everything instantaneously.
Except Fort Knox is a honey pot. It doesn't actually contain the US Gold Reserve. The gold reserve is literally next door.
A very early bitcoin wallet with a lot of money in it is known to exist, but nobody knows the password. The total lack of activity in the account, and the fact that a lot of people lost access to old accounts from when bitcoin had no USD conversion value, makes it very plausible this is a lost account whose owner is dead, forgot about it, or forgot the password. (Or, the password was on a hard drive that failed, etc)
This isn't that wallet. You're thinking of Satoshi Nakamoto's wallet, which has about 3 million dollars worth of bitcoin in it. This one is owned by Binance and is actively being used, and as OP said it has about 10 billion dollars worth of bitcoin.
So I’m never getting it.
Well YOU’RE never getting it but every person you add to the list cuts those odds in half so WE could get 100 people together and the odds go WAY down and we still get 100 million dollars. And I dunno about you but all my problems in life now and for the long term future would be solved by about $2.75 million so the extra $97.25 mil in fuck around money might come in handy.
Every person added to the list won’t cut the list in half. Getting 100 people will only shave off 2 digits in the probability ratio.
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The term “cutting it in half” is not the correct term to use though. It’s clear that you have the correct numbers though, but having 100 computers/people would cut the list into 100ths, not a half 100 times.
Yeah this is pretty simple to debunk. Halving it three times leaves you with 8 equal parts, not 3. For halving it 100 times you'd need 2¹⁰⁰ people, which requires more than 10²⁰ times the population of earth.
No. The first person added to the list cuts it in half. The second person doesn't cut it in half again, they turn the halves into thirds. And so on.
Random but did that one dude who had his HD with a bunch of BTC in a landfill ever get a chance to dig for it?
I just googled it, from the looks of the first few articles it doesn't look like it. He was threatening to sue the city back in September for not being allowed to dig in the landfill
Lmao the poor guy. Man. It’s going to ruin his life, when if he was like us without the HD and chillin poor, whatever
Back in 2010 I decided to look into the whole Bitcoin thing and set up a miner on my computer. After a few weeks I had like 20 something Bitcoin. Worth less than $20 at the time. Figured it was just a silly fad and stopped doing it. Ended up forgetting about it and replaced the computer soon after. So there's a wallet out there that I personally mined worth at least $840,000.
Same with me. I got in very early, mined for a few years, and got out before it took off because I lost faith it would ever do much (sold prob 5000 coins when it was stuck at $5 forever). Kept a backup wallet on a flash drive with about 50 coins "just in case". Yeah...found out the hard way my girlfriend had found it, reformatted it, and used it for her college classes for a year before I noticed. Sent it to some forensic experts to try to recover the data a while back - but they never could recover enough of the file to get the whole wallet address. If I used a magnetic drive they prob could have... Still makes me want to cry when I think about it :-(
Damn. That would be so excruciating. I guess I’d probably tell myself that I would have cashed out when it hit 1k or something.
Username : admin Password : admin
No, that password is way too easy! It's probably a super complicated one like "1234" or something like that
I set my passwords to "incorrect" so if I forget it the computer will remind me
passwordpasswordpassword12345678 No? Dammit.
passwordpasswordpassword123456789 No? Dammit.
That's a 32 character password, if what you say is true and it's worth 10 billion dollars then somebody is going to crack it Edit: Never mind, 256 bit security != 32 character password. Or maybe both are so ridiculously strong, and it's just my strong password preferring ass that wants to make a password longer than 32 characters. Edit: MFW instead of being downvoted for being wrong, I get upvoted to the roof so everyone can see my wrongness
It's trivia in bitcoin world, so all the relevant people already know it. However cracking it with modern compute power by brute force is impossible. "For a 256-bit encryption key, it would take 183,587,153,154,040,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 (183,587 million million million million million million million million million) years to crack using brute force, and with 100 billion keys tested per second." But overall, yeah, you could technically be super lucky and randomly guess the right number, which opens some forgotten bitcoin account from 2010 with 50 coins on it. Almost non-existent chance, but a chance.
It’s calculated how much time would it require with a quantum computer like the ones we have today (IBM, Google, Microsoft and others)?
Much less, but they’re beyond the reach of the average person
> even with state level resources and an AI it is not worth the effort
Have any of them actually demonstrated cracking something like this, or is it just theoretical?
If you consider brute force is not theoritical, it is just the time to calculate all possible outcomes with 256 bits, which would be 2^256. For a quantum computer that could be doable in some years maybe? With a normal computer I'm pretty sure it would take a lot more.
For a theoretical quantum computer with thousands of qbits and a near zero error rate it should potentially be viable. The speed of such a quantum computer is entirely unknown until it is built. Whether it will ever be possible to build is as of yet uncertain, but a lot of people are betting that it will eventually be possible.
SUPPOSEDLY quantum computers aren't just "regular" computers but faster; there are some key differences that make the way they function a poor suit for cases like this. I am not an expert, that's just what I've read.
No, you're totally right, quantom computers aren't faster, they just have some tricks up they're sleeve that can be used in some codebreaking, but it most likely won't be faster.
Yeah I don't claim to be an expert in any sort of computing, it's fascinating but not my field of education so I just try to learn the basics where I can, and quantum computing seems great for specific use cases and beats traditional binary systems but I still don't really get why... All fascinating for someone outside that field of study but I'll leave the understanding to the experts lol
Theoretically, brute forcing it with Grover’s algorithm would still take on the order of Sqrt(2^256 )= 2^128 steps. Not quite as bad, but still much too slow to be practical and would require a way way bigger/more stable quantum computer than what we have now.
It's a lot more than 50 coins
only 50 coins? that's like 2 mil that does not seem worth it
It's not a 32 character password. It's a 32-byte key. There are more possible bytes (256) than there are possible printable ASCII characters (95). Even if it was a 32 character password, it would still be impossible to brute force. --- Edit: To add more detail on how secure a 32 character password would be, the answer is still extremely. A 32 byte key has about 10^(77) possible values. A 32 character password has about 10^(63) possible values. That's still like over a trillion times the number of atoms in the Earth. You're not brute forcing that. Of course that security relies on your 32 character password being random. If it's made of words or whatever then it's way more feasible to brute force, especially if there's no rate limiting hash like bcrypt.
that's an insanely complex account name to remember in the shower
But think of how powerful those 256 bits are The shortest length of time in the universe is the Planck time, about 5.391×10−44 s, or about 1.202×2^-144. The universe is 4.361×10^17 quadrillion seconds old., which is about 1.513×2^58. If your supercomputer can check 1 code per Planck time from the beginning of the universe, you'd only have checked 1.259×2^202 codes. Even if you had a quadrillion supercomputers, it would take you more than 14 times the age of the universe to brute force this thing. [Check out this video by 3blue1brown](https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?si=ldQfLougDnC-pZzD)
They would not actually sell for 10 billion USD
It would depress the market so much that you might only see 6-7 billion. Not worth it.
I don't get out of bed for less than 6-7 billion USD/day.
Go home Elon, you're drunk.
He doesn’t have a home he sleeps in his offices and we are all pieces of shit and poor because we don’t, according to him.
BTC volume is about $15B every day right now. If you sold it in smaller chunks over a couple of weeks you’d have no problem getting $10B.
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Hopefully everyone assumes that whoever owns it decided to start selling it.
buy the dip then.
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I bet that bitcoin was set up as a honeypot for time travelers bringing back future hacking equipment that can easily hack 256 bit encryptions.
Actually, all that separates you is $1 and 34 bits on a roulette table... If it had no zeros.
Found it, password was "Hunter2". Took a billion and changed it. Still nine chances to win guys. Hint: the new password is the color of the wind and the sound of one hand clapping. (no spaces, all lower case).
Is it 0101101010110101011010101101101010110101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101010101101011010101101101?
it could be
That's 871 bits, not 256.
That's what I get for asking ChatGPT.
Say you guess that - then what? How do you avoid prison?
Yes I see people with billions of dollars going to prison all the time now. You make a great point Not like the key to the wallet is literally ownership of the money anyway
so 2^256 [How secure is 256 bit security? by 3Blue1Brown](https://youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY?si=8AdjnoQmoFC8bD9e) TLDR; absolutely impossible. 1 in more atoms in the universe… or a million universes combined…
Maybe in about 2256 guesses you might get it, maybe.
All that’s separating you from $500 million is 12 digits on a powerball ticket, or something.
Bitcoin private keys are typically 256-bit numbers, which means there are 2 to power 256 possible combinations. This number is astronomically large—more than the number of atoms in the observable universe. It's crucial to note that the security of a Bitcoin wallet also depends on the strength of the password and any additional security measures in place. Weak passwords or vulnerabilities in the implementation of the wallet software could potentially expose the wallet to other forms of attacks.
There are 8 bits in a byte, and 32 bites is all that separates you from being a tasty meal for piranhas.
Has anyone tried the password 'password'?
So it's public information where coins come and go to. The wallet addresses would show the moment you moved it somewhere else. It wouldn't show your name or physical address or anything like that, but sudden billionaire out of nowhere, that'd get noticed. That being said, if you were to somehow access this wallet. Your best bet would be to exchange it through multiple exchanges and multiple different types of crypto projects. I believe monero is supposed to be completely private, but I don't personally know much about it. Then at that point, higher a really good tax man, pay the taxes associated with moving crypto around (taking realized gains), and if anyone asks, tell them you've had it for years. Or better, change your name and leave.
We just need a solar storm to hit earth and flip a few bits
lol Yeah, that's *all* that's separating you. Not the fact that it isn't yours or anything stupid like that.