Brute-forcing Bitcoin private keys - page 3.

o_e_l_e_o

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Quote from: MrSolo on March 02, 2021, 06:06:26 AM

and my point with this topic is that people who say 2^256 and discounting the amount of wallets that are out there with a balance so you're not targeting one wallet but +40mill and growing amount of wallets. maybe oneday it will be billions of wallets.

It still doesn't matter. You are failing to comprehend the sheer size of the numbers we are talking about here.

2¹⁶⁰ is the collision space for finding a private key which matches to a specific address. This is the equivalent of trying to pick one single specific atom out of all the atoms in the entire world.

Now let's consider your "billions of wallets" situation. Let's use water as an example, and instead of "billions", let's ramp it up to 8 billion billion - enough for every person in the world to have a billion addresses. 8 billion billion molecules of water, divided by Avogadro's constant, multiplied the molar mass of water, gives 0.0002 milliliters of water. That's about 0.5% of the volume of a single drop of water. Let's spread all the molecules in that 1/200th of a single drop of water around and inside the entire planet. How likely is it going to be to find one?

You can ramp this example up by many more orders of magnitude before you approach something that is even remotely within the realms of possibilities.

shinohai

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Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on March 02, 2021, 02:32:28 AM

Quote from: shinohai on March 01, 2021, 06:03:52 PM

Since 2^256 is likely a number larger than the number an atoms in the known universe, better get to crackin' with that abacus or wait for the advent of quantum computers if/when machines capable of doing this come to exist in our lifetimes.

2²⁵⁶ is not the number of the addresses. Even if you brute force private keys, that are around 2²⁵⁶, you want to find a collision, not necessarily someone's private key. A RIPEMD-160 hash (which is the address decoded) is 160-bits long, which means 2¹⁶⁰. So you're brute forcing this number:

1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976

Since private keys are ~2²⁵⁶ and all possible combinations of addresses 2¹⁶⁰, then you're trying to find one of the ~2⁹⁶ private keys that collide with the same address. So next time you create an address, keep in mind that besides your private key, there are around 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,335 more.

I never said this was number of addresses. Plenty of tools exist to find collisions, though OP strikes me as the type that would be more interesting in playing the lottery and bashing up something to search https://allprivatekeys.com/ or something.

ranochigo

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Quote from: MrSolo on March 02, 2021, 06:06:26 AM

Well as i can see that many of the replies are about how hard it is, i do understand that, let me give you an example of bitaddress.org which was used by many people back in the day to buy bitcoin, what are the chances that someone made a wallet and transfered some bitcoins to it and forgot about it, i can refere you to this https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rli5i/if_someone_cracks_bitaddressorgs_number_generator/

Then you are exploiting potentially flawed PRNG which has been done and is completely feasible. Bitaddress uses randomness from different sources which would make it harder as you'll have to replicate both the tracked mouse movement as well as the randomness that was generated when the user enters the page.

These attacks can only work if they are using predictable variables as an entropy source. If and only if you can find a pattern in that generation, then you can reduce the search space significantly. Under no circumstances should any wallet be generating using flawed PRNG. Brainwallet stealing works similar to the above as humans are generally terrible at producing anything with sufficient entropy.

MrSolo

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Well as i can see that many of the replies are about how hard it is, i do understand that, let me give you an example of bitaddress.org which was used by many people back in the day to buy bitcoin, what are the chances that someone made a wallet and transfered some bitcoins to it and forgot about it, i can refere you to this https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rli5i/if_someone_cracks_bitaddressorgs_number_generator/

but again maybe the fact that there are +30million wallets without hearing about one wallet collision is proof of how impossible it is. and my point with this topic is that people who say 2^256 and discounting the amount of wallets that are out there with a balance so you're not targeting one wallet but +40mill and growing amount of wallets. maybe oneday it will be billions of wallets. so with technology going up and the chances of brute-force getting higher with every year not lower.

lidibibi

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It requires a lot of resources. I doubt it can be successful. Maybe lucky...

BlackHatCoiner

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Quote from: casperBGD on March 02, 2021, 02:47:43 AM

do you want to say that beside private key that I am holding for my address there is around this number private keys that will resolve into my address or something else?

Yes.

Quote from: casperBGD on March 02, 2021, 02:47:43 AM

if that is a fact, I really did not know that, but that does not seems as a good thing, is it?

It depends on what you mean "as a good thing". Brute forcing 2¹⁶⁰ is an insanely huge number. Even if 2²⁵⁶ is of course 2⁹⁶ times 2¹⁶⁰, which is even bigger, it is crazy to think that you can find one of those 2⁹⁶. So saying that 2¹⁶⁰ is less secure than 2²⁵⁶ is like saying that it's safer to keep your money on Pluto, rather than Jupiter. Both are far away, there is no point on calculating distances.

NotATether

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Quote from: odolvlobo on March 02, 2021, 12:01:04 AM

Quote from: NotATether on March 01, 2021, 10:48:22 PM

The old-school P2PK addresses are much harder to brute force since those are actually 256 bits long and aren't hashed.

That's an odd thing to say because you don't need the hashing steps when brute forcing public keys, which means it is faster.

You are right about each individual key being searched faster but look at it this way:

When you are trying to find the private key of an address, each private key you randomly generate has to be turned into a public key, and then hashed, to check if it matches the address. There are only 2^160 possible RIPEMD160 values and multiple public keys having the same hash is a non-issue because of the enormous size of 2^160.

Whereas if I only have a public key and I want to find the private key of that, there are two ways I could do it:

- Don't compute any hashes, turn all the private keys generated into public keys and compare those directly. This forces me to search the entire 256-bit space because without hashing I can't tell which public keys have the same hash160 and therefore same base58 address
- Or I could compute the hash of the the target public key and also all the pubkeys ai generate which makes the problem no different from finding a public key from an address.

So I may be searching each pubkey faster, but I'm also needlessly searching pubkeys that have the same address.

casperBGD

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Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on March 02, 2021, 02:32:28 AM

Quote from: shinohai on March 01, 2021, 06:03:52 PM

Since 2^256 is likely a number larger than the number an atoms in the known universe, better get to crackin' with that abacus or wait for the advent of quantum computers if/when machines capable of doing this come to exist in our lifetimes.

2²⁵⁶ is not the number of the addresses. Even if you brute force private keys, that are around 2²⁵⁶, you want to find a collision, not necessarily someone's private key. A RIPEMD-160 hash (which is the address decoded) is 160-bits long, which means 2¹⁶⁰. So you're brute forcing this number:

1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976

Since private keys are ~2²⁵⁶ and all possible combinations of addresses 2¹⁶⁰, then you're trying to find one of the ~2⁹⁶ private keys that collide with the same address. So next time you create an address, keep in mind that besides your private key, there are around 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,335 more.

did not understood this well?
do you want to say that beside private key that I am holding for my address there is around this number private keys that will resolve into my address or something else? if that is a fact, I really did not know that, but that does not seems as a good thing, is it?

BlackHatCoiner

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Quote from: shinohai on March 01, 2021, 06:03:52 PM

Since 2^256 is likely a number larger than the number an atoms in the known universe, better get to crackin' with that abacus or wait for the advent of quantum computers if/when machines capable of doing this come to exist in our lifetimes.

2²⁵⁶ is not the number of the addresses. Even if you brute force private keys, that are around 2²⁵⁶, you want to find a collision, not necessarily someone's private key. A RIPEMD-160 hash (which is the address decoded) is 160-bits long, which means 2¹⁶⁰. So you're brute forcing this number:

1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976

Since private keys are ~2²⁵⁶ and all possible combinations of addresses 2¹⁶⁰, then you're trying to find one of the ~2⁹⁶ private keys that collide with the same address. So next time you create an address, keep in mind that besides your private key, there are around 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,335 more.

odolvlobo

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Quote from: NotATether on March 01, 2021, 10:48:22 PM

The old-school P2PK addresses are much harder to brute force since those are actually 256 bits long and aren't hashed.

That's an odd thing to say because you don't need the hashing steps when brute forcing public keys, which means it is faster.

NotATether

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Brute forcing works by hashing a bunch of generated public keys into RIPEMD160 and as such the difficulty of brute forcing P2PKH/P2WPKH is only 160 bits since this is now reduced to comparing RIPEMD160 hashes against that of the target address.

The old-school P2PK addresses are much harder to brute force since those are actually 256 bits long and aren't hashed.

ranochigo

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Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

by studying the algos that create those wallets and patterns that may exist i think that number will be much lower, add to that if somehow you found thousands of people who are willing to brute force using a good algo for couple of years straight, then what are the chances that you maybe find a wallet with a large balance,

The complexity of those would still be fairly high, unless a weak RNG is used which could possibly lower the keyspace due to it's non-random generation. That's what some of the bruteforcing projects are attempting to do by getting these weak keys.

Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

and for people who may say this theory is crazy and not possible i refere you to the guy who actually done just that for couple of years and found private keys of 3 small wallets.

Possibly weak keys.

Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

This is like digging for gold and by technology going up i believe oneday it will be possible to brute force about 20-100 wallets each year using some crazy asic machine and a whole industry will be built around just this idea.

this is just a theory of mine which made me curious, would love to hear what you think other than no it's impossible.

Current ASIC cannot be used to generate addresses but it should be fairly simple to do so as well. Other than the speed (which we have established that it would have to generate addresses extremely quickly), you'll have to compare the addresses generated to those addresses that currently have any Bitcoins which could present itself as a slight bottleneck depending on the way it gets designed.

pooya87

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Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

This is like digging for gold

No it is not. When you find gold in earth, that gold doesn't belong to anyone. But if you find a funded private key those coins belong to someone and it is considered robbery to take them.

Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

i believe oneday it will be possible to brute force about 20-100 wallets each year using some crazy asic machine and a whole industry will be built around just this idea.

Every cryptography algorithm has an expiration date when it becomes weak and is no longer used. But long before it reaches that date, it is always replaced by stronger one, we have been doing this replacement for 2 centuries. Keep in mind that a lot of what you do on the internet depends on ECC and similar algorithms, it is not just bitcoin.

shinohai

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>would love to hear what you think other than no it's impossible

Translation: Because math is too hard, tell me some lies to make me feel better about being stupid. Roll Eyes

Since 2^256 is likely a number larger than the number an atoms in the known universe, better get to crackin' with that abacus or wait for the advent of quantum computers if/when machines capable of doing this come to exist in our lifetimes.

bigvito19

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You don't brute force them, it will take too long to do. No you can't use an asic machine either.

TheBeardedBaby

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Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

Hey, i just wanna ask if someone here has tried bruteforcing random bitcoin wallets, i understand that some of you will give me big numbers of how impossible that is, but hear me, there are more than 30.4 million bitcoin wallets with a balance (source:cointelegraph), so by dividing that 2^256 by that number you still get a high number, but by studying the algos that create those wallets and patterns that may exist i think that number will be much lower, add to that if somehow you found thousands of people who are willing to brute force using a good algo for couple of years straight, then what are the chances that you maybe find a wallet with a large balance,

and for people who may say this theory is crazy and not possible i refere you to the guy who actually done just that for couple of years and found private keys of 3 small wallets.
This is like digging for gold and by technology going up i believe oneday it will be possible to brute force about 20-100 wallets each year using some crazy asic machine and a whole industry will be built around just this idea.

this is just a theory of mine which made me curious, would love to hear what you think other than no it's impossible.

Please, post any links about the guy you refer to, because I never heard anyone to bruteforce any wallet except for brainwallets. So you say than in the future people will just bruteforce randome wallets with an alien technology, then anyone who has bitcoin wallet is in danger. If that's ever to happen people will come up with a solution to that problem and make things more coplicated so no one can bruteforce them. I won't be alive to see that tho.

ReiMomo

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Lol, brute force is not an easy job, it will guess workload too much in your computer finding a possible combination of password.
Even brute forcing your second password on blockchain.com that you have an email address and your private key will take a long time for you to recover your wallet.

It's pure of wasting your time. I have heard many people try to buy bitcoin files from a wallet.file to brute force but nothings happen.

hatshepsut93

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Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

Hey, i just wanna ask if someone here has tried bruteforcing random bitcoin wallets, i understand that some of you will give me big numbers of how impossible that is, but hear me, there are more than 30.4 million bitcoin wallets with a balance (source:cointelegraph), so by dividing that 2^256 by that number you still get a high number

2^256 is of order 10^77, 30 million divided by it is of order 10^70. It's basically the same complexity for bruteforcing with modern equipment.

Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

but by studying the algos that create those wallets and patterns that may exist i think that number will be much lower, add to that if somehow you found thousands of people who are willing to brute force using a good algo for couple of years straight, then what are the chances that you maybe find a wallet with a large balance,

There are no patterns. Private keys are created with cryptographically secure random number generators, if they were weak, all our communications would be compromised.

Quote from: MrSolo on March 01, 2021, 02:35:07 PM

and for people who may say this theory is crazy and not possible i refere you to the guy who actually done just that for couple of years and found private keys of 3 small wallets.
This is like digging for gold and by technology going up i believe oneday it will be possible to brute force about 20-100 wallets each year using some crazy asic machine and a whole industry will be built around just this idea.

Some people used some small numbers as their private keys, like 42 or 1337, perhaps as brain wallets, so if you try all keys from the start, you will find them. Big deal.

dunfida

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Bruteforcing or finding some collision is imaginable even your entire life wont be enough. Cry

So dont think about it or stressing yourself on trying.

MrSolo

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Hey, i just wanna ask if someone here has tried bruteforcing random bitcoin wallets, i understand that some of you will give me big numbers of how impossible that is, but hear me, there are more than 30.4 million bitcoin wallets with a balance (source:cointelegraph), so by dividing that 2^256 by that number you still get a high number, but by studying the algos that create those wallets and patterns that may exist i think that number will be much lower, add to that if somehow you found thousands of people who are willing to brute force using a good algo for couple of years straight, then what are the chances that you maybe find a wallet with a large balance,

and for people who may say this theory is crazy and not possible i refere you to the guy who actually done just that for couple of years and found private keys of 3 small wallets.
This is like digging for gold and by technology going up i believe oneday it will be possible to brute force about 20-100 wallets each year using some crazy asic machine and a whole industry will be built around just this idea.

this is just a theory of mine which made me curious, would love to hear what you think other than no it's impossible.

Topic: Brute-forcing Bitcoin private keys - page 3. (Read 1243 times)