Is there a way to build a wallet generator till you hit the jackpot ?

[TippingPoint]

3. Visitor enjoys an advertisement while they wait for 10 seconds or so while the attempt is made.

Preferably a Jennifer Aniston ad.

[1714136888]

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[MrTeal]

Brute-Force Concept #2

1. Create website that allows anonymous visitor to enter public key of target wallet (suggestions include suspected Satoshi address, FBI address, etc.) and public key of their "payout" wallet.

2. Visitor presses button to make 100,000 attempts to brute force the target wallet.

3. Visitor enjoys an advertisement while they wait for 10 seconds or so while the attempt is made.

4. If successful, coins are transferred to payout wallet, site shows garish WINNER!!! banner.

5. If not successful, site loads a new ad and invites the visitor to try again.

6. Site operator pays 10% of weekly ad revenue to wormbog for sharing this brilliant technique for extracting money from gamblers who suck at math.

You should probably code in a couple consolation images with inspiring quotes or "Don't worry, your mom and Charlie Sheen still thinks you're winning" that pop up once every couple billion losing clicks, just to keep people interested.

[bitpop]

Before I  go watch porn, let's agree the target shall be fbi address

[fghj]

A guy who used sha256 of poem written in exotic language as private key lost his brainwallet recently, so yeah you could make your own dictionary, maybe someone thinks that nobody will think about using password directly as key or MD5 of passwd and you will be the one who will teach him a lesson about security practices. Be creative in choosing which keys to check and you might hit big. Of course properly generated private keys are safe (well until you use them with bad RNG).

Brute-Force Concept #2

1. Create website that allows anonymous visitor to enter public key of target wallet (suggestions include suspected Satoshi address, FBI address, etc.) and public key of their "payout" wallet.

2. Visitor presses button to make 100,000 attempts to brute force the target wallet.

3. Visitor enjoys an advertisement while they wait for 10 seconds or so while the attempt is made.

4. If successful, coins are transferred to payout wallet, site shows garish WINNER!!! banner.

5. If not successful, site loads a new ad and invites the visitor to try again.

6. Site operator pays 10% of weekly ad revenue to wormbog for sharing this brilliant technique for extracting money from gamblers who suck at math.

That could actually work quite well. Or at step 2 propose something to be added to dictionary.

[bitpop]

Highly doubt it, I bet it was a simple key logger or spouse

[wormbog]

A guy who used sha256 of poem written in exotic language as private key lost his brainwallet recently, so yeah you could make your own dictionary, maybe someone thinks that nobody will think about using password directly as key or MD5 of passwd and you will be the one who will teach him a lesson about security practices. Be creative in choosing which keys to check and you might hit big. Of course properly generated private keys are safe (well until you use them with bad RNG).

Great idea. Visitor can paste in a target address, OR enter a phrase to generate into a brainwallet to sweep. The system tries a set of variations on the phrase - different word order, some words missing, letters replaced by numbers, etc.

Once people realize that any bored kid with a computer can spend their spare time attempting to hack brainwallets, perhaps people will stop relying on them so much.

[lucasjkr]

Say you know a particular vps was used to generate many wallets , and you know all the settings of that server (ram, HARDDRIVE, MAC address,etc), and rolled back your system clock to around the time that you knew it was generating its wallets. Would that increase your chances at all?

[DeathAndTaxes]

Say you know a particular vps was used to generate many wallets , and you know all the settings of that server (ram, HARDDRIVE, MAC address,etc), and rolled back your system clock to around the time that you knew it was generating its wallets. Would that increase your chances at all?

No.  Not unless they is a flaw in the PRNG.  The entropy pool is filled by chaotic events like pagefaults, mouse click intervals, cpu temp, etc.  The same user likely couldn't produce the same entropy pool if they tried.  Now if the distribution of the PRNG is flawed then one could increase their chances by focusing on the area with higher occurance but unless it is horribly flawed that would just give you an academic speed up at best (i.e. a planetary sized supercomputer needing "only" 1B years instead of 100B years).

Still on a more general level the security of a wallet any wallet is only as good as the PRNG so that should be an area of scrutiny.  If you are really concerned there are hardware RNG.

[jojo69]

hmmm, I think I will start by running the entire script of the princess bride against the FBI wallet

[Kouye]

That thread made me think of a little game:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=326545.new#new

Come and beat me (while checking for a positive balance for each attempt)

[subcoin]

This sums it up:

Let's check the math:

The "theoretical minimum possible amount of energy required to change one bit" is 1.38×10^23 J/K
That's according to wiki - Theoretically, room‑temperature computer memory operating at the Landauer limit could be changed at a rate of one billion bits per second with only 2.85 trillionths of a watt of power being expended in the memory media. From this, the energy required to count to 2x10^256 is 0.7x10^235 Joules and would take 2x10^247 seconds.

Total energy of the sun - estimated to be 1.3 x 10^44 Joules (as calculated here)

Since the difference in power is 10^203, cooling that theoretical computer would do nothing (but a nice Sci-Fi bit there).

In fact, another wiki says that the total energy of all observable Universe is 4x10^69 J.
For those who is interested the total number of atoms: 10^82.
That's just to show how HUGE 10^256 number is...

[DeathAndTaxes]

subcoin of course temperature matters.  It is right there in your wiki link.  Hint K is Kelvin a measure of temp.  The higher the temp that a perfect computer operates at the lower the efficiency.  It can't be more efficient than at absolute zero.

[subcoin]

Ok, let's compare:

0.7x10^235 vs 1.3x10^44 -> at room temperature -> Difference of 10^191
or 0.2x10^232 vs 1.3x10^44 -> at 0 Kelvins -> Difference of 10^188

For this example, chilling to 0K does precisely nothing.

But funny thing, I just realized - in this example the time is the problem, not energy.
2x10^247 seconds is inconceivably long.

[DeathAndTaxes]

It isn't time or energy, it is time AND energy.  x J for y seconds is the same as 1000x J for y/1000 seconds.  

If you have a perfect computer and the ability to scale it to an arbitrary size your computation time is the inverse of the energy output. 10x the energy, 1/10th the time. 1/10th the energy, 10x the time.

For it to "only" take 2E247 seconds would require a sustained energy output of ~1 E 235 J however our sun doesn't have that much energy (nor that much time).
Using less (say the output of our star) would mean your throughput would have to be lower and the amount counted would be less in the next 5 billion years.
On the other hand if you had significantly more energy (just the output of a billion stars) then you could do it in less (still asininely long) time.

[Ovum]

Just one thing, it seems you are doing it in base 10 and the image is counting in binary.
2^256

[subcoin]

Just one thing, it seems you are doing it in base 10 and the image is counting in binary.
2^256

Ouch, you are right!
Opps... how do I convert one to another?

It seems, most of the things is measured in 10^x something..

[Ovum]

Screwing around with the windows calculator, I obtained this result 2^256 ~ 1,16x10^77
Hope this helps.

[ninjarobot]

'the jackpot' would be other peoples money.

[ZendiMOREN]

theres 1 no owner bitcoin jackpot worth M

[subcoin]

Screwing around with the windows calculator, I obtained this result 2^256 ~ 1,16x10^77
Hope this helps.

Yes, it does. Your calculations are correct (according to this wiki page)
2^256 = 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,936

Back to original calculation:
1,16x10^77 / 1billion / 1 trillion * 2.3 = 2.67x10^56 Joules
That is, indeed, more than 12 orders of 10 of the total sun's estimated energy (1.3x10^44)

Conclusion:
The very pretty Sci-fy poster is correct - even with perfect thermodynamic computer it is impossible to just count 2^256 using all of suns energy.
Which answers the original OP's question: No it's not possible to build a wallet generator.

TA DA