Possibility for a different kind of mining?

[SoggyLettuce]

What process would be involved in trying to crack/generate others' private keys?
and
At what point are we going to start seeing asics for malicious purposes? If mining starts getting bleak would this be an option and is their a way to change the way private keys work to make this harder/ is this already impossible/hard?


Just something I was wondering about.

Edit: Did a little research and it does not seem practical at all

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[crazyates]

Check out VanityGen. It lets you search for Private Keys for addresses that start with certain addresses. See the addy in my sig? I used it to import that address into my Bitcoin-qt.

Now someone else could download that program, and hunt for my exact address. The software already exists. The problem is, it's completely and utterly impractical. Even using GPU mining, it would take millions of years to crack an addy, IIRC.

[SoggyLettuce]

Would it be possible for people to pool together and attack high value addresses?

Nevermind

[FreedomCoin]

why not?

[DigitalHermit]

why not?

It's not impossible, just highly improbable.

You could potentially hash for millions of years just to find a single address/private key and by then you'll be long dead and so won't care. ;-)