Bitcoin Forum

I've read a few articles on the insanely low probability of finding a private key that links to a Bitcoin address with a balance. However, with the exponential adaption of Bitcoin, more and more addresses will have nonzero balances. From let's say 1000 years from now, would it be feasible for someone to use brute force to find a public key with a balance?

No.

It is possible that some time in the next 1000 years some mathematical weaknesses may be discovered in come of the cryptographic algorithms used to calculate an address from a private key, and those weaknesses might make it possible to start with an address and calculate a working private key for that address.

However, it will not be possible to use brute force to find a private key for any truly randomly generated address.

1000 Years ago they had no technology like we have to day. If you take a person from the year 1017 and put in our time he would probably not comprehend what is happening. I guess the same goes for us if we time traveled 1000 into the future, especially when taking into account that the speed at which technology is developing isn't linear. So my answer is we don't know but it is possible. But who cares. in 1000 years we will have better things than Bitcoin and will have improved our cryptography algorithms so i see no reason to bother with it now.

That's what they want us to believe and every other moron out there just repeats the same answer without knowing anything.

Private key is just a 52 digit password and sooner or later some people will make some lucky guesses.

It is simple as that.

Private key isn't "just a 52 digit password". It's a 256 bit number. That means you have 1/2^256 chance of guessing it. That's one in 10^77 chances. So it's not impossible, but it certainly isn't feasible.

Imagine you have to pick one grain of sand out of all the grains sand on the Earth. Now drop that grain back into the pile and pick it up again. What are your chances of picking up that very same grain? I would say zero, and there are "only" about 10^19 grains of sand on Earth. Now imagine you have a whole universe full of sand (10^77 grains). Those are somebodies chances of guessing a private key.

SHA256 is a special type of mathematical function which is really easy to solve in one direction but is very hard to solve in reverse. At least the only known way to solve SHA256 in reverse is very hard.  So hard in fact that our best implementation is to just randomly guess until we get the answer.

If you could hack the math and find an easier solution, then you could hack Bitcoin without the need for more computing power.  Since your algorithm might be 99.99% more efficient than the brute force method, you'd only need a tiny fraction of computing power to overwhelm the network.


It's believed that quantum computers might have the ability to crack these types of one way functions way more efficiently than the brute force method.

You're going to love Rico's project, he started a project to test that exact concept. Take a look:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1573035.0

I highly doubt it. Most addresses are only used once and the actual public key is not known until it is spent and thus emptied.

To find a public key from an address with value, you'd have to break both sha256 and ripemd160 - and that would only get you the public key. Then maybe a mathematical weakness could find you the private key.

I do not see that happening. The odds are much higher that we will all wake up tomorrow morning to find that the core and BU developers had a secret meating that resolved all their differences... ;)

1/ (2¹⁶⁰) because the address is only 160 bits and there are ~ 2⁹⁶ private keys for each address

Lol at all of these old time accounts that are owned by newbies hahaha. They're so fucking obvious. It's not a 52 digit password. That's like comparing a wallet in your back pocket to a safety deposit box in a bank vault. So stupid.

@OP shame on you. At least pretend to be legendary. Read better articles with facts not fiction.

You are right. I was thinking of chances that somebody would guess you private key, but OP asks about chances of guessing a private key to an address with balance.