Topic: How did this address come into being 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE? (Read 9410 times)

It is still totally cool, I mean hot, er... ahhhhhhhh (brain explodes)

While it might be possible to create systems that "by the formal definition of the Kelvin scale is a few billionths of a degree Kelvin below absolute zero", you'll note that these systems are not colder than absolute zero.  The article clearly states:


The issue is that, "In cooler positive temperature systems, the numbers of particles in low-energy states outnumber those in high-energy states, giving rise to the formal quantum mechanics definition of temperature."

However in the system described, ". . . the entropy actually decreases as the system energy (and "heat") increase, giving rise to a negative quantum temperature."

Both are now possible since we can create temperatures below absolute zero!

http://www.dailytech.com/Researchers+Change+the+Laws+of+Physics+With+SubAbsolute+Zero+Quantum+Gas/article29557.htm

I've been focusing my efforts into creating the flux capacitor mentioned in "Back to the Future".

Heck with Bitcoins, I am going to start work on the improbability drive mentioned in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Oh yea we are really ignorant for believing that the total entropy of a system will always increase. If it wasn't like that, brute forcing some stupid hash function to steal other people's money would definitly be our least concern. We could fly to the moon with no fuel needed woohoo.

It is also possible that all of the oxygen molecules in the air of the room you are in right now will, by random chance, drift to the end of the room you are not in and you will die from lack of oxygen.

It would also be possible that someone would generate MT.Gox's cold storage address or one of those highly endowed addresses too.

Interesting.  Now this would put things into perspective to me.  Which of these two is more likely, a born mutant avatar or guessing the private key on the first try?

Because they're both possible.

My undergrad knowledge of biology is not enough to dispute this, but it seems you have agreed with me at least.

The hyperbole practically screams semantics!

It's also possible someone will experience a DNA mutation and bear offspring tomorrow with blue skin, a long tail, and the overall appearance as seen in the movie Avatar.

I'm confused about the controversy here.

It's nice to get into the math - that's fun, but what we really have here is a battle of semantics.

The word permanent does not describe an eternal situation. For something to have a permanent state, it must only remain that way for the foreseeable future.

The bitcoins in question are permanently stuck, however, they are NOT stuck eternally, regardless of technological progress.

Correct me if I am mistaken, but no matter how unlikely it seems, it is possible that someone will randomly generate this key tomorrow. Of course a brute force attack will take a mind blowing amount of time, but I don't think that is focal point of our discrepancy.

Just don't count on being the lucky winner any time soon...

Oh, probably.  I didn't check my notes on the process, I just happened to have the file with the curve constants open.  It doesn't change anything fundamental either way.  And no one is reading this thread for a tutorial on how to create addresses, they already know to look elsewhere.


For the next 50 or 100 years or whatever, the issue is going to be engineering more than physics.

The Schneier quote is here if you want to read it.  The problem really is in the 2¹⁶⁰.  A Dyson sphere around the sun for a year is plenty to iterate 2¹⁶⁰, because 160 is puny compared to 256.  In physics terms, I'm not sure how many operations are required for the other parts of finding an address.  At the limits, the resources in our solar system appear to be capable of breaking 160 bit systems, but we are far, far from approaching those limits.  Maybe our grandchildren, or great-grandchildren will ask us some day if saving 16 bytes was worth it.  But I'm not worried about it tonight.

While you might be able to imagine that the speeds necessary to calculate hashes and/or perform EC multiplication might double each year, you'll eventually find that you run into a limit in the amount of energy required to change a binary state.  When you multiply the minimum possible amount of energy required by the number of bits that have to have their state changed to perform the necessary calculations, you encounter a situation where you can't increase speed any further because all the available energy is used at the current speed.  When that energy requirement is higher than the total energy output of the sun, you can feel pretty secure in saying that it won't be possible to calculate any faster.

I think you missed a step.  After determining the public key from the private key, isn't the resulting public key hashed using SHA-256, and then that result is hashed using RIPEMD-160 to generate the address?

So isn't this more accurate?

This is different.

Start with a 256 bit counter, set to any number you like.  On the secp256k1 curve, do an EC multiply of the value in the counter by the point at (0x79BE667EF9DCBBAC55A06295CE870B07029BFCDB2DCE28D959F2815B16F81798,0x483ADA7726A3C4655DA4FBFC0E1108A8FD17B448A68554199C47D08FFB10D4B8).  Now hash that result in RIPE-MD160.  If you got 0x759d6677091e973b9e9d99f19c68fbf43e3f05f9 as the result, you found the pubkey for the bitcoin eater address.  If not, increment the counter and try again.

Do that 2¹⁶⁰ times, and you have a decent chance* at finding it.  And every other address.

Of course, the entire bitcoin network has done less than 2⁷⁰ hashes since it started.  We can't expect to do much better than ol' Gordy predicted so long ago, but figure we double the amount of work done in each year.  That means one bit per year, which means 90 years between today and 2¹⁶⁰.

Except that EC multiplication is harder than hashing.  And that we are very unlikely to beat Moore's law in the long run.

Still, the 160 bit hash is by far the weakest link in bitcoin, by a factor of 2⁹⁶ and I suspect that they will gradually fade from favor over the next 50-100 years.

* Only a chance.  We don't have know that the output of RIPE-MD160 is evenly distributed.  It is possible that there is no input that gives that output, and more likely, it is possible that no bitcoin pubkey gives that output.

You've got the reality and fantasy side of this conversation backwards.  If you are going to try to claim that computers will eventually be capable of the necessary brute force calculations to find the private key for a given address, then I'm not interested in carrying discussions any further with the sort of person that would be likely to claim that a perpetual motion (or over-unity) machine can eventually be built.

FTFY

You are mistaken.  Unless a weakness is discovered in the hashing algorithm and ECDSA (and there is no reason to assume that such a weakness will turn up), any address with a randomly generated private key (and all of these addresses created without a private key essentially have an unknown random private key) cannot and will not be found in the amount of time that our sun continues to exist.  If you believe otherwise, then you don't understand just how large these numbers are.