Bitcoin Forum

Hello, I would like to know if it is possible to start from a specific private key, for example: 'KwDiBf89QgGbjEhKnhXJuH7LrciVrZi3qYjgd9M7rFU73sVHnoWn', which corresponds to '0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001', and therefore from the associated ripemd160 prefix '751e76e8199196d454941c45d1b3a323f1433bd6', to search for a collision starting from this point.
Thank you very much.

 it is theoretically possible to search for collisions starting from a specific private key and its associated RIPEMD-160 hash, doing so in practice is highly infeasible due to the enormous computational effort required. The security of hash functions like RIPEMD-160 relies on the assumption that such collisions are not practically achievable with current technology.

It certainly is possible, but since that portion of the private key space has had so much attention and no collision has been found, I would choose a different starting point.

BTW, the math suggests that finding a collision by testing a sequence of private keys is impractical. It might seem like the odds of finding a collision are good because there are perhaps 2^256-160, or 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336 private keys with that RIPEMD-160 hash. But, the probability of a number colliding is still extraordinarily small. On average, you still have to try 2¹⁶⁰, or 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976, numbers before finding a collision.

I suggest you move this topic to Bitcoin Technic Discusssion section.

I always like to post this image when someone talks about collisions and breaking bitcoin security .

You will understand how hard it is to do what you are trying toachieve.

https://external-preview.redd.it/x4hn_K499sKjM5TSxwowOLO3rLoDeBRCco6a8kDjuoA.jpg?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=acecbfa9b9be13a0745b0bb6fe649bc5fd2330e3

A more feasible path would be to look and insecure keys generated by human, but I think all of those bitcoins were already robbed..

We all know there are collisions, but so far no one has found one and is the same for sha256, there must be multiple collisions but if you try to find an example you will not find one, and if I'm not wrong there is a budget for the one who can find a collision, i don't remember where i read this, it was some time ago.

The problem about the collisions is how big the number of possible combinations are, we are dealing with a 1 followed by 256 ceros, so, we don't have the technology to deal with that kind of numbers yet.

Good luck finding a collision starting from that specific private key - the math is against you!

As other member have said, it's possible. You just need to find collider or brute-force software which start sequentially from your chosen private key. But i would recommend you to give up. Large Bitcoin Collider project already generate 45.28 billion keys[1], but most of the time they only find private key with balance as part of puzzle[2] (where it's key range is known). As for private key which isn't part of puzzle, people suspect it was generated with weak RNG.

[1] https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/stats (https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/stats)
[2] https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies (https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies)