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Note that a bitcoin address collision takes place in a 2160 space, not a 2256, but a 160 bit collision is still unfathomably rare.
Let me to sum up and repeat: 1. I know that collision is impossible. 2. Most people do not know that collision is impossible. 3. In the transaction which sent 0.001 to my address, there were also hundreds of other addresses, to which 0.001 BTC was sent. 4. At least hundreds of people will receive random 0.001 BTC. 5. Since most people believe that collision is possible, then after receiving 0.001 random BTC, they will think, that collision happened (even if it didn't actually happen at all). 6. These hundreds of people will start to PANIC!!! 7. That is why this should be addressed/discussed/explained. In real life analogy, this would be similar to someone walking around and throwing money at random people. If this actually happened in real life, I believe it would cause a HUGE panic, especially if left unexplained. |
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Even with trillions of addresses, there would still be no collision. 2^256 is a very big number, almost as all the atoms in the visible universe.
I agree, that collision is (almost) impossible, but this could be used to create panic between those who do not understand bitcoin very well. I think this could potentially be very serious (a social "attack" to ruin bitcoin's reputation?), and should be looked into further. There will be (at least) hundreds of bitcoin users, who will think that their "newly created address" already contains BTC (as I thought at first), and if they are not familiar with bitcoin, they may very well decide it must be an address collision (suspicious fact - the first "answers" to my question "what happened?" were exactly that - "collision!"; luckily I myself know about bitcoin too much, to believe that that was the case, but many others could be easily convinced that it was collision). I said there will be hundreds (of bitcoin users affected), only judging from this one transaction that I know of. In reality, there may have been hundreds of such transactions, ant the number of such users could be tens of thousands. Let's toss a number of stars out there per galaxy. 1 trillion. 10^12 (Galaxies range from 10^7 - 10^14) 1,000,000,000 Let's almost halve the number of galaxies in the observable universe and call it a nice round 100 billion or 10^11 100,000,000 That gives us 10^23 stars in the universe. 2^256 always sounded confusing to me. Let's round it down to a nice even 10^77 power. If you generated as many bitcoin addresses as all the stars in the universe (so the 1 trillion times 100 billion) Then Sha hashes / number of stars in the universe equals Your chances of collision are then 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Give or take a few zeroes because I'm not trying too hard here. So... no, it's not going to happen. If EVERY single person on this planet (round up to 10 billion just for fun) also generated 10^23 addresses... The chance of ONE person generating a collision increases all the way to 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Get the point? Yes, you misread what I wrote. I KNOW, that collision is impossible.When I said "there will be hundreds (of bitcoin users affected)" I meant, that there will be hundreds of users who will receive 0.001 BTC randomly, and therefore, there will be hundreds of users who will THINK, that collision happened. |
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I don't have an answer for this. It would be interesting if we could find out who owns it or noticed a pattern with it. Who knows.
I'd still be curious on your rescan though if it turns up an extra 8.
Rescanned it. As I expected, no "extra" BTC. Then I'm wondering if your first post isn't quite accurate. In your transaction list, do you see the 8 btc transaction back in May? Did you create a new address and think it was this one by selecting not the newly created one, but this slightly older one? Also coincidentally, this transaction happened and you didn't notice it until after you made the new address? I have made an outgoing transaction of 0.16 BTC in 2013-05-07 23:54:20 from 1PFYcabWEwZFm2Ez5LGTx3ftzzmxJvnumK (mine) to another address (not mine). https://blockchain.info/tx/28151d2b28920bace33463573f25679405cb4658cc0b4fbf73fcd9f04791c28e0.16 BTC got sent to that address, and 8.12392643 BTC was sent to 12dcw9xbN1sj5FPjTVg5CThXjLbLv5Wu2S as change. That is all fine, the problem is - who and why sent me 0.001 BTC to this half-hidden address on 2013-07-11 08:00:19 |
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But seriously, it is hard to imagine that this is a real post. I can not imagine any adult person, who would not realize, that there are only 10000 possible password variations in your case, and that you can simply try them all, to "recover the wallet".
What I suspect this could be, is a mass-media shill posting. If someone helps to "recover" the wallet for this person, expect an article along the lines of: "a guy loses 20 BTC, but someone from the bitcoin community hacks Bitcoin to get the 20 BTC back".
Better paranoid than sorry.
It reminds me of trying to open a suitcase with a number lock of which I forgot the number. Spent an afternoon trying to open it. And those had only 3 digits. Luckily I didn't use a different code on the left side than on the right side, then it would have been 6 digits. Exactly. And would you post on the webforum asking for help on how to "recover" your suitcase? |
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What I suspect this could be, is a mass-media shill posting. If someone helps to "recover" the wallet for this person, expect an article along the lines of: "a guy loses his bitcoins, but bitcoin community hacks his wallet to get the bitcoins back".
What did you smoke? Are you really oblivious to the colossal amount of anti-bitcoin propaganda on mass-media? There were already tons of articles, describing how "Bitcoin was hacked", when in reality it was the users' computers which were hacked. |
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Hello guys, earlier this morning I bought 20 Bitcoins and sent them to my BitcoinQT wallet on my desktop. Only minutes after the transaction was complete I tried to send a few bitcoins out of the wallet and it asks for my password..
The wallet was created 6 months ago and I can not for the life of me remember the password. I know most of it the first part is "Jonhjef****" the last 4 are digits that I can not remember. I do remember that they are numbers however.
How can I recover my wallet?? I cant stand the idea of losing this much Bitcoins for such a stupid, stupid reason. Is anyone able to bruteforce it? If someones able to fix this Id have no problem giving them a percentage of whats in my wallet. help please!
You don't even need any software to "bruteforce" it. Just copy the part of the pass you remember into clipboard, then CTRL + V, type 0000, press ENTER; CTRL +V, type 0001, press ENTER... repeat until 9999 (or until you get it right). It shouldn't take you more than several hours. DO NOT SEND YOUR WALLET FILE TO ANYONE AND DO NOT INSTALL ANY "BRUTEFORCE" SOFTWARE UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY TRUST THE PERSON/SOFTWARE. But seriously, it is hard to imagine that this is a real post. I can not imagine any adult person, who would not realize, that there are only 10000 possible password variations in your case, and that you can simply try them all, to "recover the wallet". What I suspect this could be, is a mass-media shill posting. If someone helps to "recover" the wallet for this person, expect an article along the lines of: "a guy loses 20 BTC, but someone from the bitcoin community hacks Bitcoin to get the 20 BTC back". Better paranoid than sorry. |
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I don't have an answer for this. It would be interesting if we could find out who owns it or noticed a pattern with it. Who knows.
I'd still be curious on your rescan though if it turns up an extra 8.
Rescanned it. As I expected, no "extra" BTC. |
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Even with trillions of addresses, there would still be no collision. 2^256 is a very big number, almost as all the atoms in the visible universe.
I agree, that collision is (almost) impossible, but this could be used to create panic between those who do not understand bitcoin very well. I think this could potentially be very serious (a social "attack" to ruin bitcoin's reputation?), and should be looked into further. There will be (at least) hundreds of bitcoin users, who will think that their "newly created address" already contains BTC (as I thought at first), and if they are not familiar with bitcoin, they may very well decide it must be an address collision (suspicious fact - the first "answers" to my question "what happened?" were exactly that - "collision!"; luckily I myself know about bitcoin too much, to believe that that was the case, but many others could be easily convinced that it was collision). I said there will be hundreds (of bitcoin users affected), only judging from this one transaction that I know of. In reality, there may have been hundreds of such transactions, ant the number of such users could be tens of thousands. |
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No, I don't own this address. I agree, that actually it has been public since May (on the blockchain), but I never gave it to anyone as an address to pay to. So, the most realistic explanation that seems possible to me, is the same as yours - that someone randomly sent me 0.001 BTC. Then the question is - WHY?In the same transaction that sent me 0.001, it also sent 0.001 BTC to hundreds of other addresses (and there were a few larger sums too). I can only see two possible explanations to this: 1) someone is trying to create confusion and scare people, by trying to make them to believe, that an address collision has happened (because in theory this COULD be an explanation, although much less possible). 2) someone is trying to "launder" bitcoins, and even goes to the extreme of sending BTC to random people, to better hide the money trail. |
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Rescan your wallet, there should be over 8 BTC stored on it.
Did you ever backup your wallet and restore it? Bitcoin QT pregenerates a bunch of addresses that you never see. If you restored your wallet, you may not have scanned the whole block chain. You might have 8 more coins that you don't know about. Start bitcoin qt up with the -rescan flag.
There are over 20 BTC in my wallet, and the 8 BTC are counted in (I believe, but will try to rescan just to be sure). The weird thing is, that I did not send or receive any transactions in 10 days, so how can there be a transaction to my "hidden" address (which I obviously never gave to anyone) dating just 12 hours ago? |
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UPDATE: The address to which I received 0.001 BTC is https://blockchain.info/address/12k71HDvr3me6ttLr43uMgCCAhgLXNJs8TIt seems to be my "change" address (which was "hidden" inside the client from my view, but used for receiving change before??) because the first transaction to it, is at 2013-05-07 23:54:20, from my other address. BUT! It DOES NOT explain, why, and from where, there is a 2013-07-11 08:00:19 transaction of 0.001 BTC to it. It was about 12 hours ago, and I have not received of sent any BTC for 10 days. |
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Then using Bitcoin is like learning how to make doors, locks, keys before you can pay.
If you want to use a car safely, you need to know how a car is made and how it works. If you want to use a door and a lock safely, you need to know how doors, locks and keys are made and how they work. If you want to use bitcoin safely, you need to know how it works. It is pretty much common sense. |
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Internet in general doesn't put at risk your money. Bitcoin does.
It is the same as blaming a door manufacturer, because you didn't lock your door and got robbed. |
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More secure ways will and should appear. But now it's far from being ready for an ordinary user to use in terms of security.
The same could be said about the internet in general. |
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It's a pretty bold statement saying they were from Iran. For starters, I'd like to know how you came to that conclusion. Secondly, how do you know they weren't operating through a proxy? Facts > speculation.
Don't feed the troll. It is obvious this thread is a shill thread. What he basically said is "I left my house for a month, and left front door unlocked and open, and my savings on the kitchen table. When I came back, the money was gone! Thieves stole it! Oh and BTW, they were from Iran.". |
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The amount of MISinformation and DISinformation in this thread is staggering.
This thread was created only so it could later be linked to by http://www.redstate.com/2013/05/16/tech-at-night-bitcoins-central-bankers-kim-dotcom-censors-mega/I understand that Gavin is a busy man, but IMHO, promptly and accurately responding to such disinformation and FUD attacks, should be given high priority, because it may damage bitcoin more than any technical attack could. What does everyone else think about this? |
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Wait; "dust" in a wallet *can* be used as an input to a transaction. If the only thing in a wallet is "dust" then as long as there is enough of it to add up to something greater than "dust" then it can be used. What can "dust" be used to purchase? *When* the exchange rate goes up enough then the size of "dust" can be change appropriately. I fail to see the bad news here. The bad news is, that you (not you personally) played right into the troll's trap, and helped create this 24 page long thread, which was then linked to in yet another article trying to spread FUD about bitcoin. This thread was started to do just that (create and spread FUD), and it worked flawlessly. My only wonder is, why Gavin himself didn't gave a clear answer, to stop the FUD from spreading? |
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