Sorry im dumb

Sure, but it's cheaper and time wise better to play lotto

No, you can't generate a private key given an address except by trying every single possible combination. Which, if you took all the computing power in the universe and formed a trillion universes you'd not find a single key to any coins before the sun exploded.

people are already doing it and finding bitcoins in addresses

lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies

your ponzi scheme is about to collapse

You are a idiot.

Learn how public/private key cryptography works, and it will become obvious.
hint: there's a reason they're sorted by private key.

>things that never happened

"You will never need more than 16MB RAM!"

addresses and keys are generated on the fly, theres no database

why?

because if you wanted to make a searchable database of that site, you would need a supercomputer the size of the fucking earth, thats why you cant search

dumbfuck

>perfect larp

MY LINK IS GONE FUUUCK

I mean, this argument was also used similarly when computers were the size of rooms. Obviously not for the same use case, but the same idea. It's not hard to believe we'll get to a reasonable computing power to perform this sort of thing.
What you're saying sounds pretty dumb.

get used to it
all of your shitcoins will be gone soon enough

You don't understand how large these numbers are. You're dealing with numbers so large the universe itself constrains the possibility here. We aren't talking about millions or billions or trillions of possible combinations. You could use all of the energy of the fucking sun in the most efficient way (1 electron=1 combination) creating combinations and you still wouldn't have a collision. You could do this with a million suns and you still wouldn't succeed.

don't let technology pass you buy like that. the cryptography bitcoin uses is incredibly simple and easy to understand why it can never be broken even by quantum cryptography as long as you don't use a very old client that still reuses addresses.

hmm... seems naive

Then how are doing it? They're not using perfect computationally efficient suns, I think.

i just gave you examples of people brute forcing private public key pairs. how deluded can you be.

They're using the fourth dimension to access more electrons than can exist in the current universe.

The odds of that happening are 1 over 2^160

You'll have to pardon our skepticism.

intersting, i am going to move my coins to a 24 word wallet now, then split them up between many adresses.

This should lower the risk to lose all significantly.

nope. it violates all known laws of physics.

di dyou read the website? they're scanning from private key 0...001 to private key 9...999, and they're 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of the way there.

everything they've found was placed there intentionally by a single transaction, meant for people scanning incrementally to find. purposefully weak private keys, that's all they're finding.

you don't even understand what they're doing on that site, do you?

>dubbadubs
>4th dimension
Well shit I guess it checks out.

just read the posts, everything they're finding is part of a "puzzle transaction" someone created explicitly for these people to find. and the < 10 other accounts they've found wern't generated normally, they were explicitly generated to have a very low private key.

nothing to see at all.

OP,

There are approximately 2,500,000 Bitcoin addresses which currently contain a balance.

There are exactly
1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976

possible Bitcoin addresses.

You have to check all those addresses. Do you see now how fucking impossible it would be for you to find one with any money in it, let alone a decent amount?

>random words

Nah, they're collectively brute forcing

Mathematics is the fabric of the all existence. What a truly fascinating topic.

This.

See for a sense of how monumentally impossible the task is.

doesnt matter. its a POC on a small scale and they are finding results.

you deluded coiners with your muh too large numbers. the technology will catch up to this.

if a bunch of neets can do it for shits and giggles you can bet your ass that goverments are throwing much more computational resources at this.

not to mention if bitcoin is insecure, we have far bigger problems than the little 100 billion that would evaporate. the entire military/security/financial/identity industry would be over.

Every single person on Earth could collectively brute force every possible combination for every single day of their lives for the next million years and they still wouldn't even come close to beginning to find even 1 single address which contains a balance, let alone a balance worth finding.

>lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies
>chose a limited range of the total keyspace
>sprinkle a few btc across it
>???
>profit!

you can't proof of concept a brute force attack from the first private key to the last one. there's no concept, that's literally all they're doing, and its out of scope of the universe for it to ever work.

i'm sorry you find this all so confusing, but what they're doing will never work, and there is a better chance of finding a vulnerability in SHA than trying to run through every private key before the universe enters heat death.

The fact that mathematics can assure such a mind boggling inexplicable situation puts mathematics into the realm of the divine almost. What a fascinating topic.

>di dyou read the website?
Did you? They have numerous finds of addresses with funds in them that aren't "puzzle transactions", along with instructions for how the rightful owners of the BTC found this way to claim it. The first such collision is documented in their bitcointalk thread as having occurred just over a year ago.

2017-03-30 01:18:00 UTC

The pool found a private key to 7d89ad89cd10a3867b8f6bfc803838fa101b598b (1CSnQ1LnY37rwz8ezJn5xQrCrifZxExpWV) as 0x5e1667c899783. At the time of the find, there were 0.00001 BTC on that address.The funds were transferred to custody at 1Dg1XnH9BLKFf4XrWioYsxDJjSxr996Miq . See the announcement and the modalities of the return of the funds to their rightful owner here.

yes, and i explained that too
>and the < 10 other accounts they've found wern't generated normally, they were explicitly generated to have a very low private key.

there's literally nothing to see here. the cryptography is very simple. if you purposefully generate a bad private key then you might as well give away all of your coins. but that isn't a threat in any way.

ok, because you seem to need to be baby-fed:

the private key they found was 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000005e1667c899783. does that look like a normal private key to you? in case you can't answer that: no, no it is not a normal private key, nor was it generated by a normal client, it was generated purposefully as a very small number, or it was generated by a very old and buggy client, and the fact that the address is uncompressed makes it even more obvious.

See Also there are people checking trillions and trillions per day and still have found nothing.

What someone above noted was that if such a collision were found, Bitcoin could probably be adapted and changed to be even more secure. But the ramifications for the military, government cryptography and all that would be much, much worse until things were updated to be more secure.

right, if there is even a hint that any of the crypto bitcoin uses is slightly close to getting weak they just have to introduce a new address format, and link it to a new signature or hash function, and then people can move their coins over.

then if it ever gets to the point where it's too risky to allow those legacy addresses to be used, as it's clear an attack can or has already been done, they just disable the old addresses.

I don't think you understand cryptography.
It's a one way conversion from private key to public key. If someone knows the private key it doesn't matter about the public key.
The only thing keeping your coins safe is the fact that the odds of guessing your private key are astronomical. Smaller than you can imagine

>they were explicitly generated to have a very low private key
Not trying to be argumentative here, I'm genuinely curious how you could know that. Is normal private key generation artificially limited by a lower boundary? I would expect them to be almost-uniformly distributed through the entire range of possible private keys, meaning some would be randomly genned within the lower boundary that's searchable by a pool of computers checking them sequentially.

This is fascinating beyond words. I sometimes wish I would have majored in Mathematics.

I happened to major in Math and cryptography and number theory were the most interesting and memorable courses.

So, how would I log into these wallets?

What website would I visit to log into these wallets?

that argument is irrelevant.

if a public project can brute force a weak key a state sponsored or organized crime effort which is not public can do much more.

and you are actually hurting your case trying to latch onto the security military argument. states have much more invested in cracking that aspect of security.

in other words bitcoin is fucked.

adapting bitcoin to be more secure? another fork. fucking coiners when will they ever learn.

people have said it here a bunch of times. all the btc that has been found was planted. it's basically an weird arg type of thing.

because they're supposed to be random numbers, and they aren't random numbers. just look at the private key i generated above. if you can't see how that isn't a true random number i don't know how i'm supposed to help you.

if you honestly think it's physically possible to brute force the bitcoin keyspace then you're beyond hope.

>Would never happen in the age of a billion universes

>user claims it happened twice

I wasn't making an argument, just commenting on how serious it would be if that ever did happened.
>if a public project can brute force a weak key
There is no such thing as a "weak key," only a key which was made deliberately easy to access and so it wasn't random.
And
>if a public project can brute force
They can't. We already explained that.

its enough to cast doubt on this shitcoin

im not talking about 100% mapping every possible combination

I've got time and 5 computers, why not try?

If you consider time as a dimension of space, it makes these kinds of solutions possible.
It may take longer than one might like though.

just look at page one, you'll find addresses there and at the last page, because they're the keys people have hand crafted, or generated with very small numbers like privateKey(42).

you don't even know what you're talking about dude, don't even bother.

HOLY SHIT guys I just went to blockchain.info and smashed my keyboard into a wall!

I DID IT I got in my random button mashing worked!

200 BTC in my pocket you were right.
Please call the New York Times and tell them I've just broken cryptography.

See You haven't got time.

time is taken into account, and you can't bring back a solution from the future, you can only delay bringing your solution back, which won't help you at al.

Still no. The searchable space is still vastly smaller than the space with one expected meaningful address, so the expected number of meaningful addresses to find is ~0

>ITT

bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15060310

The people on the site and in the thread claim otherwise for a minority of the addresses. user says they were intentionally generated in such a way as to be found by a project like that, but no one has stepped up and claimed to have done such a thing as far as I've been able to discover.

I know they're supposed to be random, but a random number generator shouldn't have any more bias against very low numbers in its possible range than against any other arbitrary set within it. Random private keys generating random addresses WILL eventually generate addresses within a realistically searchable range. There is some small evidence that they already have, if we can take the LBC project participants at their word. The fact that it's astronomically unlikely for any of those particular pk/address collisions to have occurred is true but ultimately irrelevant; that's true of every pk/address combination, including all of the ones that ever have been used.

10/10 diagram

>all these computer illiterate retards who still fall for "MUH LOGARITHMIC COMPUTER GROWTH WE'LL CRACK IT IN 5 YEAR WITH MUH GUBBERMENT"

Stupid faggots don't realize how slow our advancements are in the grand scheme of things, are you boomers or something? Never met anyone with a knowledge in some tech field that thought we were going forward fast, while everyone who has no clue about it seems to think we'll have flying private cars going to Mars in 10 years.

try reading the site? 95% of the transactions have a link to the single transaction that send money to a bunch of addresses, all with purposefully weak keys. if you would just take the time to read maybe this wouldn't be so confusing for you?

and of course it's possible to generate the private key "1", it's also possible to generate an existing bitcoin key. understand?

not flying cars but quantum resistant signatures or algos will need to be implemented to handle the quickly advancing qubit supercomputers and AI advances will be exciting

if you use bitcoin as it was intended (not reusing addresses) it already is quantum resistant, because you don't know the public key util you spend coins from an address, and once you do those coins go to another address. only an issue for second layer networks where you may broadcast multiple transactions with your public key before any on-chain coins move, but if it gets to that they can just introduce a change in the signature.

boomer detected

I have, I'm not confused. I'm making a counterargument. The puzzle transactions aren't the ones I'm talking about, as I've said. The collisions that have been discovered that aren't puzzle transactions are the notable ones here. I haven't seen an argument that rules out the possibility of discovering a valid collision, just a lot of "no no that's impossible". seemed to want to give a good argument but gave a paint drawing instead of the the actual math for how long the LBC's computational pool would have to search before finding a valid collision. If the data for how many BTC addresses have been used is available then it should be calculable.

they're searching the ripemd-160 space, which is smaller.

you are confused. in cryptography there are just probabilities, there's no possible or impossible. you seem to think because a private key was generated with a very improbably value, that it means anything for the state of bitcoin crypto, it doesn't.

see for numbers. the point is, it would take you so long to try and brute force even a minute fraction of the bitcoin keyspace that it isn't worth it. and any collision can be very safely assumed to not be a genuine collision, especially when you found that collision right at the beginning of the keyspace.

they're absolutely not, you don't know what the ripemd is until you generate the address which you need the private key for. they're just scanning through a insignificant portion of the keyspace, looking for planted coins as "incentive" to do so. and because they're scanning at the beginning of the keyspace where a lot of people have tested private key generation and bad software has generated very tiny private keys, by chance they sometimes some across something that they didn't put there.

if they tried this at any other point in the bitcoin key space they would have found absolutely nothing.

>need the private key for
if you find a collision in that key space, you can sign messages that are just as valid, no?
i guess you can still prove you're the right owner, by revealing your sha hash and then signing for that. the attacker will have an sha hash but won't be able to sign.

>you seem to think because a private key was generated with a very improbably value, that it means anything for the state of bitcoin crypto
I never said anything about what anything in particular means for the state of bitcoin in crypto. I'm indulging the premise of the argument that some given amount of computation could find pk/add collisions with funds in a reasonable amount of time.
>see for numbers
A bit of "napkin" math using those numbers gives 1 valid collision per ~22000000000000000000000000000 years at their current rate of 26.19 trillion keys per day assuming uniform distribution, so I guess that's that.
I mean, I guess I could keep going and try to argue that given an infinite number of universes every infinitesimal probability has a 100% chance of occurring and we might just be in that universe, but at some point it gets absurd, and when I don't know words for the numbers I'm playing with we're past that point. So good night and thanks for the maths.

yes, but none of these have been collisions, they're just finding very low value private keys right at the beginning of the list of all possible private keys.

the premise of the argument is false, that's the point. none of these findings are collisions. there's a reason they've started searching at the point they have, instead of say, 1/3rd of the way into the key space.

to be honest it makes a big difference if you use a curve for the estimated hashrate and a curve for the estimated number of funded wallets.
I simply used their yearly average instead of current hashrate and I ended up with 5k collisions for that amount of time.
at the end of the day though, I think you are guaranteed to make more money from dedicating the same resources to mining blocks, so the possibility of the attack is kind of irrelevant. also like I mentioned, you can also prove the theft in arbitration.

Just google it. The numbers are way too big for it to ever happen

To give you a sense of scale:
youtu.be/S9JGmA5_unY

Its not impossible, but the chance is so infinitesimal, it might as well be impossible.