Is it possible to have a cryptocurrency where you can control generated address?

[NytHawk]

Hello.

I am new where. I don't know much about the underlying blockchain technology so I request you to please go easy on me. And please excuse my bad English too.

I discovered cryptocurrencies around 6 months ago. But since the time I discovered them, I have had problems with the fact that all cryptocurrency addresses already exist. This has bothered me a lot because I felt if someone with the right resources could go through all addresses trying to find few with balances. I was told on other forums that the chance of this happening is astronomically impossible. I did not believe this but I remained quite. Then I came across The Large Bitcoin Collider project which in a matter of 3 months or so has already found 15 Bitcoin addresses with a balance. Of these, one had a balance of 0.54 BTC. Thats quite an amount for many!

Coming back to what was said to me, that it is astronomically impossible someone could find my private key. I agree, if you are trying to search for my private key then you have a better chance of winning the lottery. But I am not talking about someone trying to find my private key, or yours. I am talking about an effort to randomly go through as many addresses to find ones with balance.

This is not something that can be compared to cracking a bank account password. If I have a bank account with ABC Bank with account number 123456789 and password a9y3zs24u0d6K@5*<ONLhF:r{ljW^Pi(, then I would wish you all the best if you wanted to crack it. But let me repeat, I am not talking about someone targeting a specific address here.

This issue has started to make me feel unhappy with cryptocurrencies. I do not like the fact that all addresses already exist, even the ones which have zero balance and of which the blockchain knows nothing about.

So my question is, would it be possible to have a cryptocurrency where you could control both the public and the private key? Or at least the private key? For example, I would like to use the following pair:

Public Key/Address: NytHawk@some-email-host.com
Private Key/Secret: J!*02gD(twzu;P.i}{<W7vTQs4:-h3fj&~`keK>yEXA^/pom8F[b=Y6BR)q+cxZG

An sha256 hash of the two would always produce 558fa7243835071efd9827497c6e458ae93a79c103ec8973ca3498cf1ad30b4f

Thoughts? Would this be possible? It would be astronomically impossible to create something like that!

Regards.

[kdoh]

As far as I know you can change your keys for your bitshares account. Can you please provide some good link on The Large Bitcoin Collider experiment? I don't think it's possible to randomly get a key with BTC, probably some fear-mongering.

[NytHawk]

As far as I know you can change your keys for your bitshares account. Can you please provide some good link on The Large Bitcoin Collider experiment? I don't think it's possible to randomly get a key with BTC, probably some fear-mongering.

Are you saying I am fear-mongering? I hope not because the fear is valid. Official website of LBC: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about

[kdoh]

As far as I know you can change your keys for your bitshares account. Can you please provide some good link on The Large Bitcoin Collider experiment? I don't think it's possible to randomly get a key with BTC, probably some fear-mongering.

Are you saying I am fear-mongering? I hope not because the fear is valid. Official website of LBC: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about

Not you, but crypto space has seen all kinds of most sophisticated FUD for years.  Large Bitcoin Collider need provide some proofs of finding random users (not their own) wallets. If it's real this will be big news.

[NytHawk]

As far as I know you can change your keys for your bitshares account. Can you please provide some good link on The Large Bitcoin Collider experiment? I don't think it's possible to randomly get a key with BTC, probably some fear-mongering.

Are you saying I am fear-mongering? I hope not because the fear is valid. Official website of LBC: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/about

Not you, but crypto space has seen all kinds of most sophisticated FUD for years.  Large Bitcoin Collider need provide some proofs of finding random users (not their own) wallets. If it's real this will be big news.

In that case, I apologize for misunderstanding you. I believe someone who has good knowledge of blockchain, cryptography should analyze this project. They already have provided details on their website but it's just too technical for me to understand.

A non-technical summary of this project is as follows:

The "Large Bitcoin Collider" (LBC - a homage to LHC) is a distributed effort to find at least one collision of private Bitcoin keys by creating addresses to private keys in a continuous 2160 range. These are checked against the list of known BTC addresses with funds on them. In the rare event of a collision, the funds on the address in question would become accessible to the collision finder.

Last night I downloaded their client and successfully deployed it using a Linux virtual machine. The project itself seems definitely legitimate however just like you I wonder the validity for their claim but I don't see anyway they can prove this. But this does not mean they are a scam.

Instead of creating more and more cryptocurrencies on an almost daily basis, developers need to focus on security of addresses. If I make a significant investment in a cryptocurrency and leave it for say, 20 years, I don't want to think of the possibility of someone randomly going through private keys of addresses to come across my address which contains my hard earned money.

In another forum where I had this same discussion, I got a response saying that this wouldn't be possible and that it is "like this by design". This just isn't an acceptable answer. Tell that to the guys who wanted to go the moon.

Edit: Few more important pages from that site:

https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/stats
https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/trophies