Liberating Bitcoins held hostage by Satoshi.

[Artofficial]

Shouldn't take too long to brute force the keys with several pooled ASICs.

[BlueHeron]

This does not make any sense - care to elaborate?

[Anon10W1z]

There is no bitcoin held in hostage. There is a bitcoin waiting to be mined and solved and given out with its 24 friends. But these bitcoins won't be done in only a few years, they will still keep coming till about 2100-2140, depending on how fast our hardware gets.

[Mike Christ]

[ranlo]

Wow, that's a great image, . I read through it as well. The problem here is that these laws are still theories and can be broken. Will they? Probably not. But there is still a slight possibility.

[Mike Christ]

Wow, that's a great image, . I read through it as well. The problem here is that these laws are still theories and can be broken. Will they? Probably not. But there is still a slight possibility.

If we can assume technology is always improving, then eventually, at an indeterminate time in the future, Bitcoin's crypt will be broken (not by brute-forcing, but by a security flaw we've yet to discover.)

However, the great thing about Bitcoin is that it can easily switch to another form of encryption, which I presume will happen before SHA256 is broken.  So even if SHA256 fails, Bitcoin can chug along with the next best encryption.

[worldinacoin]

Satoshi has invented Bitcoin and given it to the community, saying that he is holding it hostage isn't very fair.

[Explodicle]

Shouldn't take too long to brute force the keys with several pooled ASICs.

Here's a rough ballpark example, assuming:
Your several ASICs have a combined 500 GH/s
You'd have to make 2^96 possible guesses to get Satoshi's address

(2^96 hashes) / (500,000,000,000 hash/s) = 1.58456325×10^17 seconds
That's about 5 billion years.

[Mike Christ]

That's about 5 billion years.

Or about 500 million years longer than the Earth's been around

[Artofficial]

Why hack a block for a mere 25btc every ten minutes.

This is not about a weakness in SHA256, but human error. Satoshi is, after all only a H4cker.

[mprep]

I dont believe satoshi has any bit coins

Maybe he does. You never know.

[Mike Christ]

Why hack a block for a mere 25btc every ten minutes.

This is not about a weakness in SHA256, but human error. Satoshi is, after all only a H4cker.

I have no idea what you're saying   I recommend reading up more on Bitcoin and how it works.

[Artofficial]

This is not about a weakness in SHA256,......

or Bitcoin.

[JSMill]

http://miguelmoreno.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fYFBsqp.jpg

I love this image.  Great tool when explaining bitcoins.  Thanks for posting.