I got my satoshis back!
I just picked up this thing again and see where I could end up with noob python skills and new insights.
Estimated time to check all possibilities was 270 days but I found my key already within 20 hours!
I thought to let it run, and resume the script after optimizations to speed things up. I was not going to wait 270 days, but I was (extremely) lucky I guess.
My script does approximately 15 keys/second (4 instances, 60 k/s total) and checks against a cleaned up version of
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=267618.msg15398605#msg15398605The address generation goes by 100 keys/second, but to check that address against the UTxO goes even slower, 15 keys/second.
There were 750 million addresses to check...
It's very slow, but I'm still happy with the result.
Although the reward was only 1 mBTC, I learned a lot during the process.
Now let's see if I can optimize this a few factors...