There are zero documented cases of someone stealing coins by bruteforcing private keys. Whenever someone gets their coins stolen, it's because of malware, phishing, and some dumb mistakes like using brainwallets.
The idea that you can guess a private key comes from people who don't know math and who think that if something is possible to happen, than it can realistically happen or already happened.
Topic: Crypto vs "the lucky dude" --- Is Bitcoin really SAFE? - page 2. (Read 303 times)
From what I understand the only defense against this event is to divide your assets into many accounts to reduce the risk.
No, the defense against this is math:Let's say we have a trillion planet Earths. On each Earth, there are a trillion people. Each person has a trillion computers. Each computer generates a trillion keys a second. All these computers have been creating a trillion keys per second since the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. 10^12 * 10^12 * 10^12 * 10^12 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 * 13.7 * 10^9 = 4.3*10^65. This means thay they would have so far generated approximately 0.0000000004% of all private keys.
If you are worried about someone using such a site to stumble across your private key, then you should be absolutely terrified of dying from a meteor strike, shark attack, or lightning strike, all of which are exponentially more likely to happen. You should also be terrified about someone guessing your credit card number and stealing all your fiat, since for every possible credit card number there is somewhere in the region of 10 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion possible private keys.
I know that in mathematical terms, finding a private key of a bitcoin address is virtually impossible ... but not impossible. Having said that, a site like https://www.privatekeys.directory/ gives the ability to virtually explore all the private keys existing in the elliptic curve. The Random button on the site https://www.privatekeys.directory generates pages of private keys that could reveal addresses with a positive balance!!!
Considering that whale accounts and exchange accounts contain thousands of bitcoins, one lucky guy could accidentally find millions of dollars on hand !!
From what I understand the only defense against this event is to divide your assets into many accounts to reduce the risk. But even this trick can't ensure your funds aren't stolen by a lucky dude.
Considering that whale accounts and exchange accounts contain thousands of bitcoins, one lucky guy could accidentally find millions of dollars on hand !!
From what I understand the only defense against this event is to divide your assets into many accounts to reduce the risk. But even this trick can't ensure your funds aren't stolen by a lucky dude.
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