Bitcoin Forum

Has this ever happened before?

Follow-up questions:
If there becomes 100 trillion wallets in use, do you think finding a wallet with a balance will become common? Is the current private key secure enough to last 10,000+ years?

Is there a way to scale up the security of the generated private keys somehow if needed someday?

I don't think you understand my questions. And looking for a non-newbie to answer them. (No offense)

I just hacked this Adress in a second: 12AKRNHpFhDSBDD9rSn74VAzZSL3774PxQ

Private Key is:
5JdeC9P7Pbd1uGdFVEsJ41EkEnADbbHGq6p1BwFxm6txNBsQnsw

So. Yes this has happened before.

I don't have my English to Nerd translator handy, butt is your query about the probability of bitcoin address collisions?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104461.0 "What are the chances of an address collision? and what happens when it does?"




Did this actually happen to you? All your coins stored in one address? Or was the wallets password compromised?

8  )

They have done the calculations and always shows it is more Profitable to mine BTC with the hashpower than attempt to crack a wallet. Even generating new wallets hoping to find Bitcoins is less likely than mining a block. The chances are Ridiculous tiny (not in your lifetime).

100 trillion addresses = 10^14
All possible addresses about 10^48

10^48 / 10^14 = 10^34

Each time you generate a new address you have 1 in 10^34 to find any one of those 100 trillion addresses

With a properly generated private key?

No.


100 trillion is a VERY small number.  The answer to your question is no.


Assuming that no new weaknesses are discovered in the ECDSA, SHA256, and RIPEMD160 algorithms, the current private key is secure enough to last more than 14 billion years (note that the entire universe is probably less than 14 billion years old right now).

If weaknesses ARE discovered in any of those algorithms, then the algorithm can be replaced before weaknesses are discovered in any of the other two.


Yes, but it might require a hard fork.

Oh, you mean it was a brain-wallet address generated by a simple phrase.

We are working on this now.  We are devising an algorithm that exploits certain weaknesses to get to address keys.  More on this later. 

The scientific answer to your question is 'Yes'.  But it is challenging.

A key collision has never happened and will not happen in the life of bitcoin,  if the human race is still using bitcoin in 200 years time, never mind 10,000 then we have been utter failures...... ;)

904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102837043110636675 keys

so you want 100 trillion private keys
hmm
only
904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102737043110636675 keys
to go

The pessimists will be most surprised. 

Thanks for many of your replies, this is especially helping me understand the security better.

For clarification, I am talking about 100 trillion private keys NOT addresses.

904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102837043110636675
maximum amount of private keys

That's good, because addresses don't actually exist at the protocol level.  Addresses are an abstraction that wallets use to make it easier for we humans to discuss the transfer of control over value.

At the protocol level there are just scripts.  One script is used to encumber a transaction output with a requirement that must be met in order to spend that output.  The other script is used in the input to a transaction to satisfy the requirements of the output being spent.

When using a bitcoin address that starts with a '1' the wallet translates that to a script that encumbers the output with a requirement to provide a digital signature generated with a private key that is associated with a given public key hash.  Other address types will have other scripts.  Some output scripts don't even require a private key at all (although those are typically not a secure way to transfer control over the associated value).

Change your subject, if it is a genuine question not for trolling!

"Can Private Key be hacked... ?" !!!

franky1,

I'm not sure where you got your number, but it seems a bit small to me (a bit more than 2 orders of magnitude too small).  I thought the actual number of valid private keys was:
115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336

Am I mistaken? How did you calculate your number?

Danny is correct.
0xFFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFE BAAE DCE6 AF48 A03B BFD2 5E8C D036 4140
equals
115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key#Range_of_valid_ECDSA_private_keys
Online conversion tool to use for quick conversion: http://www.mobilefish.com/services/big_number/big_number.php

Yes. The simple phrase was 1 :D

The Master troll at work again, so just ignore him. The next thing he will do is to direct you to his master list of hacked private keys. ^fake^ Just test him and create 100 or 1000 bitcoin addresses and send it to him, so that they can prove that they found 1 single private key out of the lot. You will wait forever, because it cannot be done.

The logical answer to your question is `No` because it is basically impossible.

The day when they break ECDSA or SHA256 or RIPEMD160 algorithms, the whole financial system will collapse, because most of their systems are based on it too. ^smile^

Encryption is based on using prime numbers only and guessing the right combination of the key is like reading 1 billion numbers and words and then typing them exactly in the same order from your memory, that's how hard it is for even super computers of today to brute force a key.

However if quantum chips start to scale in Qbits and be able to for example, a pin code 3 digits and they are 371 now QC can calculate all the possible combinations in one try without actually trying them but imagine if you have 101 digits do you know how long it'll take for a CPU to put out and try all the possible combos? and the QCs that we have today aren't powerful enough to do the job.

forget about 10000+ years think o present days because mode of currency and value exchange keeps changing every 200to 500 years. take example of past. at early we have nothing but exchange took place with rice and wheat, mango and orange but after that came metals, then came metal coins and paper, then paper currency and we have digital currency for which we need internet
but may be in future we will have someother mediumof value exchange.

probably not possible to find the private key of any certain bitcoin address because it consist of 26 alphabets(a-z) + 26 capital alphabets (A-Z) and ten digits(0-9) so combining all the would produce about I order of billion trillions of possible combination and to find the exact private key would few years then even with super fast bandwidth.

If you have a huge volume the just store it on a flask drive or external hard drive that way the hacker will no longer have an access to your bitcoin since it is not connected online. There are many ways on how to store your bitcoins especially for big time holders. If you are just doing your research then you can find many alternatives on how to avoid hacking and some of it are on this forum.

This was already happened before, that many bitcoin wallets in blockchain has been hacked by someone and $100 million worth of bitcoin has been stolen, but, this hacking was not because of using bruteforce. Hacking a bitcoin wallet using its private key and using bruteforce to know this private key is impossible, maybe it is, if someone would develop this bruteforce up to something that can hack any kind of passwords. Private key contains a 64 character compose of numbers and letter, big and small letters, so it is impossible to do this thing.

I remember using bruteforce to hack someone's facebook and it failed, but sometime it works. Note, the facebook password is more weaker than the private key on every bitcoin wallet, that is why for me it is impossible to hack this by just using bruteforce.

The chances of a private key getting hacked are smaller than you getting killed today in a traffic accident on your daily commuting for your job. Actually way higher odds than you die in a traffic accident than your keys getting hacked (or any keys whatsoever).

So yeah, you got better things to worry about.

You will never Brute force it... Breaking a symmetric 256-bit key by brute force requires 2128 times more computational power than a 128-bit

key. 50 supercomputers that could check a billion billion (1018) AES keys per second (if such a device could ever be made) would, in theory,

require about 3×1051 years to exhaust the 256-bit key space. So... stay calm, it will never happen.  ;)

What did you use to hack the address?

I don't think this is accurate. If there's anything "in your wallet" then that means the address has already been entered into the blockchain and is now a matter of public record, so if there were a way to hack someone's private key from their public address it would be easy to find. Even if you have an "empty wallet," which is kind of a nebulous term since at that point it's just a generated key, the question the OP was asking is whether or not someone could hack or randomly generate a duplicate key which corresponds to someone else's wallet - the answer is yes, whether the key has ever been used or not. As other people have said, though, the chance is ridiculously small. It would take far more than the $100 billion market cap of all cryptocurrencies to even come close to the computing power necessary to generate, test and transfer out large amounts of bitcoin from other people's randomly-generated wallets. At that point we'd be better off devoting a supercomputer to spend 7 million years coming up with the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything... though we'd probably come up with 42.

As far as security for keeping your bitcoin personally safe, yeah, keeping your private keys in an encrypted paper wallet that's been generated on a new, freshly-formatted computer with no network connections and then putting the paper wallets in a lead box and storing them in an underground bunker is probably safe enough. The hacks that I've read about weren't instances of people's wallets actually being hacked, but of the private keys being found when their PC's security was compromised.