Brutforcing a wallet

[blodyx]

It is not hard to find a wallet(the bitcoin address) with enormous amount of money in it.

Its not hard to find a network with enormous amount of hashing power(any pool).

So my question is; How safe is it realy? How long time would it take for a big pool to break a singel address and can it be done?

[iFacts]

You can't just access a wallet if you know it's address. You need to know the private keys, which are private.

[blodyx]

I know to little of cryptography to even start...

Isnt cracking the privatkey about the same work as we already do?

The vanity thing. its just making random addresses and when you find the right public key you also have the private key?

[blodyx]

It is not hard to find a wallet(the bitcoin address) with enormous amount of money in it.

Its not hard to find a network with enormous amount of hashing power(any pool).

So my question is; How safe is it realy? How long time would it take for a big pool to break a singel address and can it be done?

Pretty much impossible. It would take many many lifetimes over. Don't believe me try it! https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen

Here I tried to brute force this address https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH better known as DPR's coins.
https://i.imgur.com/D4Buoip.jpg

lol that wallet would be worth "mining"

[Rannasha]

It is not hard to find a wallet(the bitcoin address) with enormous amount of money in it.

Its not hard to find a network with enormous amount of hashing power(any pool).

Bitcoin ASICs can't generate private key / address pairs. They can only mine blocks.

So my question is; How safe is it realy? How long time would it take for a big pool to break a singel address and can it be done?

Like I said, pools with their ASICs can't "break" addresses. And even if they could, it would take far longer than it takes the sun to burn out and die. The address space is simply that large.

[Altoidnerd]

This doesn't even apply to point groups...just hashes.  I know you still can't get the keys.  Just a question about hash functions in general.

So I've tried to stare at hash code and stare and stare and figure out what actually make its irreversible.  Obviously, I lost track of the bits (I was trying to keep it together up here ->    but I didn't follow along..lost it somewhere around xor...).

But... is the irreversibility actually fundamental?  if you could ultra slow motion camera the bits literally flipping due to electrical impulses in the CPU, could you not play the movie backward discovering the inverse of the hash?

Parity and time reversal NeOne!?

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[tacotime]

Forget about that vanitygen stuff. Check out Evil-Knievel's Private Key cracker instead ... it operates 1000x faster than vanitygen  

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421842.msg4588472

Let's see... 150,000,000 keys per sec on a 7970, or 1.5 * 10^8 k/s.  There are maybe 1.0 * 10^8 Bitcoin addresses with unspent outputs.

If I remember right, the complexity of addresses is 2^128.  So, you have 1/(1.0 * 10^8 / 2^128) = 3.4 * 10^30 keys as the inverse of your probability for finding any private key to some unspent output (or basically, your reduced search space after accounting for all keys with unspent outputs).

That's (3.4 * 10^30 k / [1.5 * 10^8 k/s]) = 2.3 * 10^22 seconds to find a single private key to spend a random address' Bitcoins with a single 7970.  

That's only 52,000 * the age of the entire universe, so you should find one pretty quick!

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[tacotime]

That's 100m public addresses with unspent outputs divided by the number of all possible addresses including collisions, or more simply the probability of any address of having an unspent output.

edit: Oh, duh, it's the inverse of that, sorry. X)

[byt411]

Why would you even want to bruteforce a wallet anyway? Are you a nasty thief that has nothing else to steal?

[gadman2]

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[gadman2]

Well, the "laws of the universe" know time dilletation right?
You could cause a computer, which is accellerated to near light speed, to bruteforce for 100.000.000.000 years (your picture states that power consumption is negligable)  while here on earth only a few seconds pass by. This is Einstein's "laws of the universe".  

You'd have to do the math but even if 100 billion years pass in a few seconds how many seconds would it take to count to 2^256. Probably a incomprehensible amount of seconds.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Well, the "laws of the universe" know time dilletation right?
You could cause a computer, which is accellerated to near light speed, to bruteforce for 100.000.000.000 years (your picture states that power consumption is negligable)  while here on earth only a few seconds pass by. This is Einstein's "laws of the universe".  

You'd have to do the math but even if 100 billion years pass in a few seconds how many seconds would it take to count to 2^256. Probably a incomprehensible amount of seconds.

Well, bruteforcing one address in 100 billion years might be possible, in fact you may even be able to bruteforce a few more than that.

[gadman2]

Well, the "laws of the universe" know time dilletation right?
You could cause a computer, which is accellerated to near light speed, to bruteforce for 100.000.000.000 years (your picture states that power consumption is negligable)  while here on earth only a few seconds pass by. This is Einstein's "laws of the universe". 

You'd have to do the math but even if 100 billion years pass in a few seconds how many seconds would it take to count to 2^256. Probably a incomprehensible amount of seconds.

Well, bruteforcing one address in 100 billion years might be possible, in fact you may even be able to bruteforce a few more than that.

Might want to rethink that...

115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 addresses

and

3155760000000000000ish seconds in 100000000000 years. I'll let you figure up the rest of the math.

[coinits]

I can crack any crypto wallet in seconds, problem is I can not afford a quantum computer.

In all seriousness, can you imagine one of these bad boys hashing?

http://www.dwavesys.com/en/products-services.html

Quantum computing has arrived, thanks to Canadian ingenuity with funding from the CIA and Jeff Bezos.

Maybe we should start a group funding thread for one:)

Also what happens when someone (government or corporation with deep pockets) turns one of these loose on encrypted 'anything'

[gadman2]

I can crack any crypto wallet in seconds, problem is I can not afford a quantum computer.

In all seriousness, can you imagine one of these bad boys hashing?

http://www.dwavesys.com/en/products-services.html

Quantum computing has arrived, thanks to Canadian ingenuity with funding from the CIA and Jeff Bezos.

Maybe we should start a group funding thread for one:)

Also what happens when someone (government or corporation with deep pockets) turns one of these loose on encrypted 'anything'

I don't think you understand the concept of "...they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasable until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."

[coinits]

I can crack any crypto wallet in seconds, problem is I can not afford a quantum computer.

In all seriousness, can you imagine one of these bad boys hashing?

http://www.dwavesys.com/en/products-services.html

Quantum computing has arrived, thanks to Canadian ingenuity with funding from the CIA and Jeff Bezos.

Maybe we should start a group funding thread for one:)

Also what happens when someone (government or corporation with deep pockets) turns one of these loose on encrypted 'anything'

I think someone proved that quantum computing doesn't help much in this scenerio.

Maybe, maybe not. But I want one to hash with

[Nephilims]

I imagine in this thread I know the least about the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies and this may be a bit off topic, but when bitcoins reached $1,200 I was curious to know how secure they were, so I gave my kid a task. He had 2 hours to see how many bitcoin addresses he could generate while checking each one for a positive balance. He found 3 accounts that contained many many bitcoins, I was so tempted to take them, that I had to delete his internet history.

[Nephilims]

I imagine in this thread I know the least about the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies and this may be a bit off topic, but when bitcoins reached $1,200 I was curious to know how secure they were, so I gave my kid a task. He had 2 hours to see how many bitcoin addresses he could generate while checking each one for a positive balance. He found 3 accounts that contained many many bitcoins, I was so tempted to take them, that I had to delete his internet history.

Yeah ok... Do you know how bitcoin addresses are even generated? Most applications have very unique entropy, so just by generating addresses you probably wouldn't get any hits. What was he using for the entropy source?

He typed long strings of random characters to generate each address.

[gadman2]

I imagine in this thread I know the least about the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies and this may be a bit off topic, but when bitcoins reached $1,200 I was curious to know how secure they were, so I gave my kid a task. He had 2 hours to see how many bitcoin addresses he could generate while checking each one for a positive balance. He found 3 accounts that contained many many bitcoins, I was so tempted to take them, that I had to delete his internet history.

Yeah ok... Do you know how bitcoin addresses are even generated? Most applications have very unique entropy, so just by generating addresses you probably wouldn't get any hits. What was he using for the entropy source?

He typed long strings of random characters to generate each address.

El oh El. Troll.

[Nephilims]

I imagine in this thread I know the least about the technical aspects of cryptocurrencies and this may be a bit off topic, but when bitcoins reached $1,200 I was curious to know how secure they were, so I gave my kid a task. He had 2 hours to see how many bitcoin addresses he could generate while checking each one for a positive balance. He found 3 accounts that contained many many bitcoins, I was so tempted to take them, that I had to delete his internet history.

Yeah ok... Do you know how bitcoin addresses are even generated? Most applications have very unique entropy, so just by generating addresses you probably wouldn't get any hits. What was he using for the entropy source?

He typed long strings of random characters to generate each address.

El oh El. Troll.

I am not trolling

After seeing that, I assume it is very easy to generate addresses that contain coins and that you guys have to be aware of it. I forgot to mention he also found a few accounts that previously had coins too. But like I said, I am not trolling, just sharing my experience with the community.

[samurai1200]

Um.

[U1TRA_L0RD]

I Really want to build a super GPU computer consisting of over 30 High end GPU's and take everyones BTC.

[byt411]

I Really want to build a super GPU computer consisting of over 30 High end GPU's and take everyones BTC.

LOL that is obvious, look at your trust rating!

[Nancarrow]

Well, the "laws of the universe" know time dilletation right?
You could cause a computer, which is accellerated to near light speed, to bruteforce for 100.000.000.000 years (your picture states that power consumption is negligable)  while here on earth only a few seconds pass by. This is Einstein's "laws of the universe".  

Unfortunately "Einstein's laws of the universe" work precisely the other way round. Bump something up to near lightspeed for however long you like, then bring it back, it'll only have run SLOWER than if you'd left it on Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

[cr1776]

Well, the "laws of the universe" know time dilletation right?
You could cause a computer, which is accellerated to near light speed, to bruteforce for 100.000.000.000 years (your picture states that power consumption is negligable)  while here on earth only a few seconds pass by. This is Einstein's "laws of the universe".  

Unfortunately "Einstein's laws of the universe" work precisely the other way round. Bump something up to near lightspeed for however long you like, then bring it back, it'll only have run SLOWER than if you'd left it on Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

I'm glad I read to the end of the thread before pointing this out too.  ;-) 

[U1TRA_L0RD]

I Really want to build a super GPU computer consisting of over 30 High end GPU's and take everyones BTC.

LOL that is obvious, look at your trust rating!

Not even close to being a scammer, A scammer buster, I had to give negative to warn the community and I got negative back, Read before talking buddy

[sase007]

Well... you can try to bruteforce wallet if you have enought time...


 
enought time = a few thousand years

[U1TRA_L0RD]

Well... you can try to bruteforce wallet if you have enought time...


 
enought time = a few thousand years

I will have to take out my wizardry book to enhance the GPU's xD

[sase007]

Well... you can try to bruteforce wallet if you have enought time...


 
enought time = a few thousand years

I will have to take out my wizardry book to enhance the GPU's xD

lol

But seriously now:

he could do it (in theory) if he has blessing of night mother...
It is like solo mining... you can find block in 1 minute or never

[Altoidnerd]

You will be happy to know brute forcing takes a little bit longer on the surface of the earth as clocks tick slower here than in free space.

If you sent away a brute forcing computer at high speeds, it would appear from earth's vantage point to be brute forcing more slowly.  So the brute force starship attack by brute speed is fundamentally flawed.

[odolvlobo]

Do not believe these disbelievers, nor believe all these eye catching "all addresses are safe" posters.
Just take a look at my video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC43aOdsf4g&hd=1) where I actually crack a private key live on camera.
All transactions in this video are performed on the real block chain, and can be verified on blockchain.info.

First off how do we know you entropy was not something like 1 and the cracker just generated that character first. This shows no flaw, it shows nothing. You took a public key from an unknown entropy and got the private key. You didn't brute force any private key. Until you brute force my private key, this video is invalid.

Lol, if the entropy was 1 we would have only two different addresses generated. But the random address generator was generating dozens of different addresses. More precisely, the entropy came from pythons "random.randrange()".
Actually, now I know that you are just trolling as you seem to ignore everything that I try to explain. You said it is not possible to crack any private_key ... but I have just cracked a private key in seconds. A private key of a legit bitcoin address verified on blockchain.info. So your statement is clearly not true.

You have demonstrated that random.randrange() can be an extremely poor entropy generator. I hope that no real bitcoin address generator uses that function to generate addresses, though I guess it is possible that someone might use it.

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[flatfly]

Do not believe these disbelievers, nor believe all these eye catching "all addresses are safe" posters.
Just take a look at my video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC43aOdsf4g&hd=1) where I actually crack a private key live on camera.
All transactions in this video are performed on the real block chain, and can be verified on blockchain.info.

First off how do we know you entropy was not something like 1 and the cracker just generated that character first. This shows no flaw, it shows nothing. You took a public key from an unknown entropy and got the private key. You didn't brute force any private key. Until you brute force my private key, this video is invalid.

Lol, if the entropy was 1 we would have only two different addresses generated. But the random address generator was generating dozens of different addresses. More precisely, the entropy came from pythons "random.randrange()".
Actually, now I know that you are just trolling as you seem to ignore everything that I try to explain. You said it is not possible to crack any private_key ... but I have just cracked a private key in seconds. A private key of a legit bitcoin address verified on blockchain.info. So your statement is clearly not true.

You have demonstrated that random.randrange() can be an extremely poor entropy generator. I hope that no real bitcoin address generator uses that function to generate addresses, though I guess it is possible that someone might use it.

hmmm.... for starters, randrange() is not a generator.

also, many wallets and tools use that function. One simple example is NoBrainr:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=308972.0

I would like to challenge you to "crack" any key generated by it...

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[flatfly]

flatfly: I have reviewed NoBrainr and I thing you do not need any of these sophisticated tools to crack addresses created by it.
Actually, a simple programmable calculator is enough.

Let me grab all cold wallets ever created with NoBrainr, and come back to this thread ;-)

I'm not convinced about your uber hax0r skills but you sure are entertaining

Of course, if you post a proof (other than a funny/shaky/blurry video), I'll review my statement

[Evil-Knievel]

This message was too old and has been purged

[prezbo]

flatfly: I have reviewed NoBrainr and I thing you do not need any of these sophisticated tools to crack addresses created by it.
Actually, a simple programmable calculator is enough.

Let me grab all cold wallets ever created with NoBrainr, and come back to this thread ;-)

I'm not convinced about your uber hax0r skills but you sure are entertaining

Of course, if you post a proof (other than a funny/shaky/blurry video), I'll review my statement

There is no proof needed:

Nobrainr:
Wordlist Length: 7776
Number of Random Words: 7
Size of Search Space: 7776^7 = 1.71 * 10²⁷
Maximum Possible Search Space: 2²⁵⁶ = 1.15 * 10⁷⁷
Result: Searchspace is Reduced to this percentage: 1.484618518476838608918817891513466139612896777*10^-50

I am starting right away, in the hope that anyone has a 1000 BTC cold wallet out there just waiting for me.

Good luck with that.

[flatfly]

flatfly: I have reviewed NoBrainr and I thing you do not need any of these sophisticated tools to crack addresses created by it.
Actually, a simple programmable calculator is enough.

Let me grab all cold wallets ever created with NoBrainr, and come back to this thread ;-)

I'm not convinced about your uber hax0r skills but you sure are entertaining

Of course, if you post a proof (other than a funny/shaky/blurry video), I'll review my statement

There is no proof needed:

Nobrainr:
Wordlist Length: 7776
Number of Random Words: 7
Size of Search Space: 7776^7 = 1.71 * 10²⁷
Maximum Possible Search Space: 2²⁵⁶ = 1.15 * 10⁷⁷
Result: Searchspace is Reduced to this percentage: 1.484618518476838608918817891513466139612896777*10^-50
Analogon: This means like I can hide a 10 dollar bill anywhere in the universe, but by accident I have hidden it somewhere in your house.

I am starting right away, in the hope that anyone has a 1000 BTC cold wallet out there just waiting for me.

This is all well known. (Full discussion in the NoBrainr thread)

It must be a hell of a programmable calculator you have if it can crack that. I want the same one

Also I'd love to try out what you're smoking.

(No offense meant, I was also young and naive not so long ago)

[odolvlobo]

You have demonstrated that random.randrange() can be an extremely poor entropy generator. I hope that no real bitcoin address generator uses that function to generate addresses, though I guess it is possible that someone might use it.

hmmm.... for starters, randrange() is not a generator.
also, many wallets and tools use that function. One simple example is NoBrainr:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=308972.0
I would like to challenge you to "crack" any key generated by it...

You are right. I was being sloppy. The problem is not with random.randrange() specifically, but how it might be used. For example, this is an extremely poor way to generate addresses:


key <- SHA-256(random.randrange(0, 2³²-1, 1))

I'm guessing that this is similar to how the OP generated the addresses that he could easily crack.

[odolvlobo]

There is no proof needed:
Nobrainr:
Wordlist Length: 7776
Number of Random Words: 7
Size of Search Space: 7776^7 = 1.71 * 10²⁷
Maximum Possible Search Space: 2²⁵⁶ = 1.15 * 10⁷⁷
Result: Searchspace is Reduced to this percentage: 1.484618518476838608918817891513466139612896777*10^-50
Analogon: This means like I can hide a 10 dollar bill anywhere in the universe, but by accident I have hidden it somewhere in your house.

I am starting right away, in the hope that anyone has a 1000 BTC cold wallet out there just waiting for me.

Before you start, at least try to figure out how successful you might be: If you can check 1 trillion addresses per second (10¹²), then it will take you only 10¹⁵ seconds (32 million years) to go through the entire space.

[prezbo]

Before you start, at least try to figure out how successful you might be: If you can check 1 trillion addresses per second (10¹²), then it will take you only 10¹⁵ seconds (32 million years) to go through the entire space.

No no no, don't you dare bring logic into this!

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Well, the "laws of the universe" know time dilletation right?
You could cause a computer, which is accellerated to near light speed, to bruteforce for 100.000.000.000 years (your picture states that power consumption is negligable)  while here on earth only a few seconds pass by. This is Einstein's "laws of the universe". 

You'd have to do the math but even if 100 billion years pass in a few seconds how many seconds would it take to count to 2^256. Probably a incomprehensible amount of seconds.

Well, bruteforcing one address in 100 billion years might be possible, in fact you may even be able to bruteforce a few more than that.

Might want to rethink that...

115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 addresses

and

3155760000000000000ish seconds in 100000000000 years. I'll let you figure up the rest of the math.

You are thinking counting in terms of now, you don't know the technology we'd have in 100-200 years let alone 100 billion.

[BurtW]

Dear Threadstarter...

Do not believe these disbelievers, nor believe all these eye catching "all addresses are safe" posters.
Just take a look at my video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC43aOdsf4g&hd=1) where I actually crack a private key live on camera.

All transactions in this video are performed on the real block chain, and can be verified on blockchain.info.

Have fun watching.

First off how do we know you entropy was not something like 1 and the cracker just generated that character first. This shows no flaw, it shows nothing. You took a public key from an unknown entropy and got the private key. You didn't brute force any private key. Until you brute force my private key, this video is invalid.

Lol, if the entropy was 1 we would have only two different addresses generated. But the random address generator was generating dozens of different addresses. More precisely, the entropy came from pythons "random.randrange()".
Actually, now I know that you are just trolling as you seem to ignore everything that I try to explain. You said it is not possible to crack any private_key ... but I have just cracked a private key in seconds. A private key of a legit bitcoin address verified on blockchain.info. So your statement is clearly not true.

You are not cracking anything stop saying it cause you are trolling, you trying to spread FUD, but what you did was just take advantage of poorly created addresses. "random.randrange()" isn't used in any wallet system that I know of it, so this isn't a problem.

What I am actually taking advantage of are "weak" addresses. They are not the same as poorly created addresses. Weak addresses may come from any entropy source - i could (if I had the time to) generate weak adresses using "/dev/urandom" and they would be still crackable easily.
It does not depend on the entropy, in fact it all depends on the distance to a rendezvous point.

See:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=437220.msg4813821#msg4813821

[jubalix]

how do you locate Rendezvous addresses?

[BitEscrow]

This whole concept is really, really, flawed. Every single key and wallet ever made can be found at directory.io If you know how to brute force theres your weakness.

[itod]

This whole concept is really, really, flawed. Every single key and wallet ever made can be found at directory.io If you know how to brute force theres your weakness.

Let me give you a hint how to avoid being laughed to in public: Think for a few seconds before you post. If you tried that before you posted this above you would notice there's 121 byte of data in every line on that page that looks like this:

5HpHagT65TZzG1PH3CSu63k8DbpvD8s5ip4nEB3kEsreAbuatmU 1MsHWS1BnwMc3tLE8G35UXsS58fKipzB7a 1Q1pE5vPGEEMqRcVRMbtBK842Y6Pzo6nK9

Also you would notice that there are 128 lines per page. The site claims there are 904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102837043110636675 such pages in their database. If you multiplied these three numbers you would get:
https://www.google.rs/search?q=121+*+128+*+904625697166532776746648320380374280100293470930272690489102837043110636675
That's the number starting with 1 and having 79 trailing digits after that. You would immediately realize that mankind would never have database that big and that something must be wrong with your thinking, and you would not post!

Alas, that would have the consequence we would not laugh, which is bad for us, but good for you.

[Mivexil]

This whole concept is really, really, flawed. Every single key and wallet ever made can be found at directory.io If you know how to brute force theres your weakness.

If you know how to launch the Earth away from your PC at near-light-speed velocity, then maybe, maybe. But let's just say, you'd need a very big catapult

Also, @itod, I think this site generates the addresses per request. That would make it somewhat plausible.

[itod]

Also, @itod, I think this site generates the addresses per request. That would make it somewhat plausible.

Of course, serves the next 128 keys no matter what page number you type in URL, you can check. A joke.

[fran2k]

It is not hard to find a wallet(the bitcoin address) with enormous amount of money in it.

Its not hard to find a network with enormous amount of hashing power(any pool).

So my question is; How safe is it realy? How long time would it take for a big pool to break a singel address and can it be done?

Pretty much impossible. It would take many many lifetimes over. Don't believe me try it! https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen

Here I tried to brute force this address https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH better known as DPR's coins.

Epic. 7.2E23 years.

[gweedo]

It is not hard to find a wallet(the bitcoin address) with enormous amount of money in it.

Its not hard to find a network with enormous amount of hashing power(any pool).

So my question is; How safe is it realy? How long time would it take for a big pool to break a singel address and can it be done?

Pretty much impossible. It would take many many lifetimes over. Don't believe me try it! https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen

Here I tried to brute force this address https://blockchain.info/address/1FfmbHfnpaZjKFvyi1okTjJJusN455paPH better known as DPR's coins.

Epic. 7.2E23 years.

Yep it proving the that the laws of the universe are in line with bitcoin!

[Razick]

It is not hard to find a wallet(the bitcoin address) with enormous amount of money in it.

Its not hard to find a network with enormous amount of hashing power(any pool).

So my question is; How safe is it realy? How long time would it take for a big pool to break a singel address and can it be done?

There are so many different possible addresses that for all practical purposes it would be impossible.

[Poker Tilt]

It is not hard to find a wallet(the bitcoin address) with enormous amount of money in it.

Its not hard to find a network with enormous amount of hashing power(any pool).

So my question is; How safe is it realy? How long time would it take for a big pool to break a singel address and can it be done?

There are so many different possible addresses that for all practical purposes it would be impossible.

agreee anything will bee possible for hacker .
but nor for address wallet .

[btcsup]

If it was that easy to hack a wallet private keys,
we would for sure heard this long before your post.

[bigasic]

I was messing with the program where you put in a passphrase and it will make a bitcoin address. I actually found two that were used. one passphrase was satasi nakamoto and I cant remember the other one but it was an easy on too. Found that kind of interesting..

[BurtW]

I was messing with the program where you put in a passphrase and it will make a bitcoin address. I actually found two that were used. one passphrase was satasi nakamoto and I cant remember the other one but it was an easy on too. Found that kind of interesting..

Generally, creating a private key from a passphrase is a very bad idea.  Private keys should be created from a cryptographically secure random number generator.

[Razick]

You can't just access a wallet if you know it's address. You need to know the private keys, which are private.

Once you have even one single outgoing transaction, your public key is NOT private.

Right, the public key is never supposed to be private. The person you quoted is referring to private keys.

[Razick]

I was messing with the program where you put in a passphrase and it will make a bitcoin address. I actually found two that were used. one passphrase was satasi nakamoto and I cant remember the other one but it was an easy on too. Found that kind of interesting..

Generally, creating a private key from a passphrase is a very bad idea.  Private keys should be created from a cryptographically secure random number generator.

If you use a password that is either very long or created from a cryptographically secure source it should be fine, right? The chance of you brute forcing Ia*1a&5vR9NltU*$Ofl2 is extremely slim. If you can memorize it, the reduced risk of loss probably makes up for the reduction in security, which, while exponential, is still slight for practical purposes.

[jonald_fyookball]

You can't just access a wallet if you know it's address. You need to know the private keys, which are private.

Once you have even one single outgoing transaction, your public key is NOT private.

Right, the public key is never supposed to be private. The person you quoted is referring to private keys.

Public key is private also on unspent address.  This is extra security especially against poor wallet implementations.

[Vortex20000]

You can't just access a wallet if you know it's address. You need to know the private keys, which are private.

Cracking a bitcoin address with CPU is simple but takes a long time. With enough CPU I imagine an address per month would be a decent timeframe.

Google "Vanitygen".

[OnkelPaul]

Cracking a bitcoin address with CPU is simple but takes a long time. With enough CPU I imagine an address per month would be a decent timeframe.

For some values of "simple", some values of "long", and some values of "enough".

In other words, impossible.

Onkel Paul

[forsakenpnut]

You can't just access a wallet if you know it's address. You need to know the private keys, which are private.

Cracking a bitcoin address with CPU is simple but takes a long time. With enough CPU I imagine an address per month would be a decent timeframe.

Google "Vanitygen".

Per month? I highly doubt it. More like couple hundred years.

[gadman2]

You can't just access a wallet if you know it's address. You need to know the private keys, which are private.

Cracking a bitcoin address with CPU is simple but takes a long time. With enough CPU I imagine an address per month would be a decent timeframe.

Google "Vanitygen".

Simple? Yes.
In a month? Theoretically impossible.

If you were to combine the computational power of every supercomputer, every computer, every laptop and tablet, every cell phone, every TI 89 calculator, every abacus, and every person on the planet with pencil and paper trying to guess the private key of a certain Bitcoin address would take so incredibly long that you, nor anyone else, could begin to fathom that amount of time.

[Vortex20000]

You can't just access a wallet if you know it's address. You need to know the private keys, which are private.

Cracking a bitcoin address with CPU is simple but takes a long time. With enough CPU I imagine an address per month would be a decent timeframe.

Google "Vanitygen".

Simple? Yes.
In a month? Theoretically impossible.

If you were to combine the computational power of every supercomputer, every computer, every laptop and tablet, every cell phone, every TI 89 calculator, every abacus, and every person on the planet with pencil and paper trying to guess the private key of a certain Bitcoin address would take so incredibly long that you, nor anyone else, could begin to fathom that amount of time.

Lol, just looked at the numbers. It would take my personal gaming computer 9,000,000,000,000 years to crack a private key.

Oops.

[odolvlobo]

You can't just access a wallet if you know it's address. You need to know the private keys, which are private.

Cracking a bitcoin address with CPU is simple but takes a long time. With enough CPU I imagine an address per month would be a decent timeframe.
Google "Vanitygen".

Let's look at the math...

There are 2¹⁶⁰ possible addresses. That's 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 addresses. Now there are ASIC miners that can compute 1 trillion SHA-256 hashes per second, so I can imagine an ASIC machine that could compute 1 trillion bitcoin addresses per second. That's 1,000,000,000,000 addresses per second. With that device, you could crack most of the 2¹⁶⁰ possible addresses in about 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,020 seconds, or about 1,112,253,909,688,662,799,241,769,279,083 years.

Now, to be fair, you don't have to crack every address -- just the ones with the coins. I believe there are about 200,000 addresses with a non-trivial amount of BTC. With the device I described above, you could crack one of those addresses every 5,561,269,548,443,313,996,208,846 years, not once a month.

[Dabs]

You need someone with a 6th sense. Someone who can see "dead people". Someone who has some sort of little bird that tells them "The private key is ..."

That's the only way you get to "crack" it.

Brute force is never the fastest way. The fastest way is to use the $5 wrench.