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Topic: Are there people attempting to brute force random keys? (Read 72 times)

sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 696
How about if you generated a vanity address? Would it be more feasible for someone to crack the private key if they used the same vanity address generator? Or are random generators so good these days that any bias is negligible?

This is a good question. Concerning VanitySearch if you use a passphase seed, a base key is generated and used to generate addresses up to reach the desired prefix (similar to BIP38 and BIP44 derivation paths),  no PNRG is used. Trying to find the key would require to find the seed and to compute until the prefix is reached. That means that to find a private key you have to perform (in average) 'prefix difficulty' time 'number of possible seed' iterations, which is huge.
A tool such as john the ripper that generates password can beat weak passwords on system using fast password encryption algorithms (such as MD5) but in the case of vanity addresses, you need for each password to run up to the prefix difficulty. In other words, this is unfeasible.




legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1827
How about if you generated a vanity address? Would it be more feasible for someone to crack the private key if they used the same vanity address generator? Or are random generators so good these days that any bias is negligible?
legendary
Activity: 2870
Merit: 7490
Crypto Swap Exchange
If you look on thread / post made on various forum, you could find people who attempt to do it, then complain they're wasting their time Tongue

But normally people only do it when they found weakness on private/public key generation, from weak CSPRNG/PRNG to find backdoor k values on ECDSA.
sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 696
Something about that is on the Readme of VanitySearch, for those who want formulas and who want to calculate probability Wink
https://github.com/JeanLucPons/VanitySearch#trying-to-attack-a-list-of-addresses
copper member
Activity: 1610
Merit: 1899
Amazon Prime Member #7
I would refer you to the below picture to help you understand the probability of finding a "random" private key with coin in it:


There are 2^160 possible private keys. For comparison, there are currently approximately 2^26 unspent outputs, however some addresses have multiple unspent outputs.

If a private key was generated randomly, for all intents and purposes, it is not going to be found out via a brute force attack.
legendary
Activity: 3808
Merit: 7912
Does anyone know of people out there attempting to brute force random addresses (no prior information at all, just hoping for a miracle)

 Yep. 
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/large-bitcoin-collider-collision-finders-pool-1573035

they are not brute forcing random addresses/private keys. they are solving a puzzle to find private keys that were intentionally placed in an extremely smaller space compared to actual private key range to be found easily.

 Oh!  I thought they were in a fruitless pursuit for ill-gotten coins so I didn't delve into it when it started and never got the full story.  All this time I thought they were a bunch of thieving bastards who would never be successful.
 I might have been wrong on one of those counts Wink

legendary
Activity: 3444
Merit: 10558
Does anyone know of people out there attempting to brute force random addresses (no prior information at all, just hoping for a miracle)

 Yep. 
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/large-bitcoin-collider-collision-finders-pool-1573035

they are not brute forcing random addresses/private keys. they are solving a puzzle to find private keys that were intentionally placed in an extremely smaller space compared to actual private key range to be found easily.
legendary
Activity: 3808
Merit: 7912
Does anyone know of people out there attempting to brute force random addresses (no prior information at all, just hoping for a miracle)

 Yep. 
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/large-bitcoin-collider-collision-finders-pool-1573035
hero member
Activity: 1218
Merit: 534
Does anyone know of people out there attempting to brute force random addresses (no prior information at all, just hoping for a miracle)
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