Brutforcing a wallet

[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.