Bitcoin Forum

Okay, not sure if this has been discussed before but I 'm just wondering how possible it is for a hacker to find a HD wallet with fund (via means like brute force)? Before I move on further, you might probably counter that by saying for 128-bit that would translate to 2^128 = 3.4028×10^38, so it will be almost impossible to come across one seed address that contains fund and that would take eternity which makes the whole effort pointless to hack.

But what if the scenario changes in 20 years to come when the bitcoin has achieved that level of mass adoption. Imagine if let's say there are 8 billion human population and half of that numbers adopted bitcoin. That would give 4 billion and that is assuming every single one of these users only has one seed account.

Thus instead of probability of 1/3.4028×10^38 to find an account, you now have 1/1.7014×10^29. In this scenario you still won't be able find it easily but with increased probability and advancement in computer technology which let's say able to churn out approx one million of balance checks per second in 20 years time, how feasible would that be to find a seed that contain fund in it?

Note that I'm not trying to create FUD here but merely looking at security point of view and possibilities when using HD.

Good. You answered your own question before you even asked it.  Now you can close this thread and move on.


Oh dear.  I thought you already understood that we are dealing with VERY BIG numbers here.  Apparently I was mistaken.


I know you were probably raised to think of "billion" as a very big number, but relative to the numbers we are working with, "billions" is a VERY SMALL number.  So small, that there isn't any importance difference between the number 1 and the number 1 billion.


You won't be able to find it at all.


Not feasible at all.


You are either trying to create fear, or you have already fallen victim to the fear that someone else was trying to create.


Good.  Now that we've looked at it and come to the understanding that the numbers of possibilities are VERY BIG, and that the numbers of attempts that a brute force attempt can make are VERY SMALL, can we close the thread and move on?

Depends. If you use a simple password such as password1, it could be cracked in a matter of minutes. That's why it's best to use a random password such as $!%^%aSPdsfsf!$!$%#$%^. So that an attacker can't simply use an English wordlist to crack the password

OP is talking about seeds, not passwords.


That does not look random to me. It looks like you moved your hand across the keyboard from left to right several times. There are lists for all kinds of paterns humans come up with when the "randomly" mash the keyboard.

Keeping in mind that the age of the universe is currently estimated at 13.8X10⁹ years old...

1 million is 1X10⁶

There are 3.1536X10⁷ seconds in 1 year.

Therefore, if you could "churn out approx one million of balance checks per second", then you could check 3.15X10¹³ addresses per year.

Therefore if you started generating keys and checking balances at the beginning of the universe (before stars, or planets, or life, or anything existed), and continued without interruption until today, you would still only have checked 4.35X10^23 addresses.

This means under those obviously impossible circumstances, you'd still have less than 0.00025578% chance of finding a collision by today.

So, go ahead and start trying in 20 years, and let me know how well you did when the age of the universe doubles.

This is just another of the several hundred threads on this forum that demonstrate just how bad the average person is at comprehending numbers that are VERY BIG.

Good - you did some calculations...

... but why did you stop?

OMG YOU MEAN I COULD GUESS SOMEONE ELSE'S BITCOINS!!!!!!!!!!! SO UNSAFE, NO WONDER MTGOX GOT HACKED!!!!!!!


/s

this.  10^29 still 100,000 times bigger than a trillion trillion.  We're good.