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Cracking Bitcoin Addresses on AWS (coinspin.app)
4 points by coinspin 1632 days ago
2 comments

This is neat. I've always wondered when/if computers will be powerful enough to break the crypto algorithms behind all of these coins.
What are the chances of guessing a bitcoin private key? This is about Ethereum but it's a staggeringly large number.
What are the chances of guessing a bitcoin private key?

If they are 256 bit hashes then there are approximately 2^256 private keys possible and the author guessed around 2^31 possibilities in 6 months with 0 hits at a cost of $720. I can't do math this big on my phone but it would be at least 10^40 years to get even a first guess, and by that point you've spent more on compute than that first wallet would have in it.