Chinese team released software to mine Satoshi's coin

[odolvlobo]

Using brute force guessing, you are currently 7,142,168,459,456,328,726,581,608,448 times more likely to solve a block than to guess a private key. Guessing private keys is stupid. It is much more profitable to mine blocks than to mine private keys.

Chance of guessing the private key of an address: 1 / 2¹⁶⁰
Chance of guessing the nonce that solves a block: 0x1713DD x 2¹⁶⁸ / 2²⁵⁶

Correct me if I'm wrong here but didn't Satoshi had around 1 Mil BTC on one of his single addresses?

No, he used a different address every time. But even if an address has 1,000,000 BTC, it still would be better to mine than to try to guess its private key.

[galbros]

While I agree this is a long shot it does seem to show a potential issue for bitcoin in the future.  Sites like directory.io have already posted every bitcoin address and its corresponding private key.  If a computer can just search that huge number of addresses you could get satoshi's or anyone else's for that matter coins.

I do like the point about how it would be better to just mine bitcoins with the corresponding computer power.

[ajareselde]

It's bull is what it is. What would be the point of the attack on his private key? If it had any valid point and reasonable chance,
people wouldn't be mining bitcoin, they would be trying to crack private keys.
I'm pretty sure there is an alternative motive to this "project", and given the history of such things, i'm staying away.

[vm_mpn]

Using brute force guessing, you are currently 7,142,168,459,456,328,726,581,608,448 times more likely to solve a block than to guess a private key. Guessing private keys is stupid. It is much more profitable to mine blocks than to mine private keys.

Chance of guessing the private key of an address: 1 / 2¹⁶⁰
Chance of guessing the nonce that solves a block: 0x1713DD x 2¹⁶⁸ / 2²⁵⁶

Correct me if I'm wrong here but didn't Satoshi had around 1 Mil BTC on one of his single addresses?

No, he used a different address every time. But even if an address has 1,000,000 BTC, it still would be better to mine than to try to guess its private key.

Copy that O... Many thanks for the clarification.

[fryarminer]

Correct me if I'm wrong here but didn't Satoshi had around 1 Mil BTC on one of his single addresses?

Yeah and he tattooed the private key on the belly of his hippopotamus!

[odolvlobo]

While I agree this is a long shot it does seem to show a potential issue for bitcoin in the future.  Sites like directory.io have already posted every bitcoin address and its corresponding private key.  If a computer can just search that huge number of addresses you could get satoshi's or anyone else's for that matter coins.

I do like the point about how it would be better to just mine bitcoins with the corresponding computer power.

The jokes on you. directory.io is fake. It only computes the bitcoin addresses for the private keys on the pages you look at.

[NyeFe]

While I agree this is a long shot it does seem to show a potential issue for bitcoin in the future.  Sites like directory.io have already posted every bitcoin address and its corresponding private key.  If a computer can just search that huge number of addresses you could get satoshi's or anyone else's for that matter coins.

I do like the point about how it would be better to just mine bitcoins with the corresponding computer power.

The jokes on you. directory.io is fake. It only computes the bitcoin addresses for the private keys on the pages you look at.

In other worlds. By the time you would have finished skipping through all the pages, our sun and trillion trillion trillions of other stars would have imploded

[Klestin]

We all know that Chinese aren't that far behind in terms of technology. In fact, theirs are advancing at a fast rate. Even though they hold the sufficient technology to crack or generate the same private keys to Satoshi's addresses, it still is a resource-consuming and time-consuming effort to recover those coins

Once again, it's not a matter of "better technology".  It doesn't matter how fast the computers they have are.  It doesn't matter how many computers they have.  They could go 10,000 years into the future, steal all the computers on Earth, and bring them back in time to the beginning of the Universe, then run them nonstop trying to crack a single private key.  They could run them while the early galaxies form, run them while our star is born, while the Earth congeals, while life begins, and until they again reach today.  They would fail. 

Brute force will never. Ever. Ever. EVER. crack a 256 bit key. No matter what.

[btcbobby]

We all know that Chinese aren't that far behind in terms of technology. In fact, theirs are advancing at a fast rate. Even though they hold the sufficient technology to crack or generate the same private keys to Satoshi's addresses, it still is a resource-consuming and time-consuming effort to recover those coins

Once again, it's not a matter of "better technology".  It doesn't matter how fast the computers they have are.  It doesn't matter how many computers they have.  They could go 10,000 years into the future, steal all the computers on Earth, and bring them back in time to the beginning of the Universe, then run them nonstop trying to crack a single private key.  They could run them while the early galaxies form, run them while our star is born, while the Earth congeals, while life begins, and until they again reach today.  They would fail. 

Brute force will never. Ever. Ever. EVER. crack a 256 bit key. No matter what.

Umm, if someone can zip 10.000 years into the future, then pop up at the dawn of time, I doubt they'Ed have any interest in any encryption key. Just saying!

[vm_mpn]

Correct me if I'm wrong here but didn't Satoshi had around 1 Mil BTC on one of his single addresses?

Yeah and he tattooed the private key on the belly of his hippopotamus!

Lol... Thanks for the fun fact Fr... I'm one of those people who believe everything they read on the internet.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Even if Satoshi gave you half of his private key and let you guess the rest of the numbers, you still couldn't do it in a sensible timeframe. Don't waste your breath on such dead simple software for private key cracking.

[chriswen]

Interesting.  It wouldn't be just brute forcing if you're smart about.

Maybe there is some flaw in Satoshi's random number generation or private key generation.

And I don't think he sent 1 million btc to one address but he has a ton of addresses with 50 BTC that people were able to link to him.  And if he generated that many public keys than maybe there is a pattern.

[hl5460]

According to the guy that released the software, he claimed that they had cracked two addresses but refuse to specify, saying it would destroy the integrity of bitcoin.
They also said they had found 38,187 addresses that belong to Satoshi, or 50*38187=1,909,350 btc.

[Kprawn]

They could use that computing power to mine blocks, and it would give a bigger gain in their life time, than trying to find matching private keys.

It would just be a pure fluke, if they do match up a single address with a private key, and by that time, they would have wasted a lot of money on electricity cost.

Let them do this, and show how secure SHA 256 is, if they did not solve it in 50 years. 

[AGD]

According to the guy that released the software, he claimed that they had cracked two addresses but refuse to specify, saying it would destroy the integrity of bitcoin.
They also said they had found 38,187 addresses that belong to Satoshi, or 50*38187=1,909,350 btc.

It would be easy to provide a proof. My chinese has weakened over the last years, did they provide the txid of the stolen coins to confirm this on the blockchain?

[Mt. Gox]

Using brute force guessing, you are currently 7,142,168,459,456,328,726,581,608,448 times more likely to solve a block than to guess a private key. Guessing private keys is stupid. It is much more profitable to mine blocks than to mine private keys.

Chance of guessing the private key of an address: 1 / 2¹⁶⁰
Chance of guessing the nonce that solves a block: 0x1713DD x 2¹⁶⁸ / 2²⁵⁶

Correct me if I'm wrong here but didn't Satoshi had around 1 Mil BTC on one of his single addresses?

No, he used a different address every time. But even if an address has 1,000,000 BTC, it still would be better to mine than to try to guess its private key.

So according to the maths, it only makes more sense to attempt to brute force a private key if the address contains 25*7,142,168,459,456,328,726,581,608,448 BTC (excluding miner fees). And even then, your miner would break and the earth would get swallowed up by the sun before you found a private key corresponding to one of Satoshi's addresses (which only contain 50 BTC since he never consolidated his coins into one single large address like most others).

While I agree this is a long shot it does seem to show a potential issue for bitcoin in the future.  Sites like directory.io have already posted every bitcoin address and its corresponding private key.  If a computer can just search that huge number of addresses you could get satoshi's or anyone else's for that matter coins.

I do like the point about how it would be better to just mine bitcoins with the corresponding computer power.

You could, but it's so highly improbable that it's not really worth thinking about. So far, private keys that have been brute forced almost always corresponded to weak brainwallets.

And directory.io hasn't really posted a "list" of addresses and private keys. Instead, it just generates them on the fly.

EDIT: I see odolvlobo has already mentioned this. It caused quite a big scare when it was first made public though! Someone posted the link with the title "Bitcoin has been hacked" which caused some people to panic at the time. From reading the responses in this thread, it looks like people have smartened up since then:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ruk0z/dont_panic_directoryio_thing_is_fake/

[Troonetpt]

The math is simply, everyone can figure it out, we have enough reasons to question their motive.

[Skunk Fu]

We all know that Chinese aren't that far behind in terms of technology. In fact, theirs are advancing at a fast rate. Even though they hold the sufficient technology to crack or generate the same private keys to Satoshi's addresses, it still is a resource-consuming and time-consuming effort to recover those coins. SHA-256 is secure enough to be cracked by our technology for the next couple of centuries, and I doubt that even with the world's most advanced computers today, the algorithm would be cracked within a short span of time.

"Far behind"? !!!

LOL!
They are way ahead of everyone.
The truth is, you should consider yourselves lucky to say that YOU are not far behind the Chinese in technology.

[Mt. Gox]

We all know that Chinese aren't that far behind in terms of technology. In fact, theirs are advancing at a fast rate. Even though they hold the sufficient technology to crack or generate the same private keys to Satoshi's addresses, it still is a resource-consuming and time-consuming effort to recover those coins. SHA-256 is secure enough to be cracked by our technology for the next couple of centuries, and I doubt that even with the world's most advanced computers today, the algorithm would be cracked within a short span of time.

"Far behind"? !!!

LOL!
They are way ahead of everyone.
The truth is, you should consider yourselves lucky to say that YOU are not far behind the Chinese in technology.

Check out the recipients of the Fields Medal (equivalent to the Nobel Prize in Mathematics) and you'll see that most of the ground breaking work in mathematics (which cryptography is a part of) is done by US and UK based researchers. There is also the Turing Award (equivalent to the Nobel Prize in Computing) for outstanding contributions in computer science and that one is mostly awarded to US-based researchers. Same goes for the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, Rolf Schock Prize, and the Nevanlinna Prize. All of these prizes are dominated by US-based mathematicians and computer scientists.

[Skunk Fu]

Here they are working hard at it!!

http://i2.wp.com/img.chinasmack.com/www/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/china-wuhan-school-desks-have-railings-to-prevent-student-near-sightedness-myopia-01.jpg

It's the software at work!!!
All those little buggers are now doing mathematical equations and sha256 hashes in order to find the private keys to Satoshis addresses.