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
Fortunately they don't have the sufficient technology to crack or generate the same private keys to Satoshi's addresses.
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.
Quantum computers could shorten the time required to break SHA-256. Computers 10,000 years in the future could be using exotic materials and technologies that we don't yet know about or even begin to comprehend.
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.
Perhaps, but having half of a private key actually shortens the entropy significantly. It would take not half as long to crack but something like millions of times less. It's probably irrelevant still, but it's something to consider when dealing with similar situations (e.g. a 12 word Electrum seed where you know the first 6 words is much easier to crack than a typical seed).
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.
This is possible. Mycelium had a similar flaw at one stage.
You're right about the 50 BTC thing. He has many addresses scattered all over the blockchain with each address containing 50 BTC (plus any fees).
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.
From what I've read, the most commonly accepted figure is 1 million BTC. Most of that would have been from mining in 2009 when virtually nobody else was mining (other than a few very early adopters like Hal Finney). 2 million BTC seems a bit high IMO but if he continued mining all the way up until now and changed his practice of not consolidating coins in order to remain undetectable then it might just be possible.
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.
If it's revealed that they actually managed to match up one of Satoshi's confirmed addresses with a private key then it's probably not a good idea to dismiss it as a fluke. Since the chances of such a thing happening are so vanishingly small, it would be more reasonable to assume that there is something much larger and more significant at play (most likely it would be an undocumented flaw in SHA-256 or an implementation of it).
