Topic: Lost Bitcoins - page 2. (Read 14282 times)

Oh boy.   

Sure, but quantum computing can recover them only if they are truly lost.  If the keys are hidden in a safe, there is nothing that quantum can do.  Truly magical that quantum thing.

According to current technology, there is no way to recover the lost bitcoins. Can quantum computing recover? As I know, using quantum to solve computing problem is still in preliminary research stage and we do not see big progress. The only promising area in quantum as I know is in to enhance the security. But if current encryption technology cannot survive, we will create a new one. Otherwise, not only bitcoin, there is nothing can encrypt.
To wrap it, do not worry about quantum.

This article by Chris Pacia answers my question comprehensively:

Bitcoin vs. The NSA’s Quantum Computer


http://www.bitcoinnotbombs.com/bitcoin-vs-the-nsas-quantum-computer/

But btc isn't like real gold or currency. The total amount of total bitcoins produced is fixed, wich means that btc will extinct in a matter of few minutes or a geological era.

People regularly loose banknotes, some gold coins were in boats which sunk, and some diamonds have felt in a fire. There's nothing new with people losing BTC.

lost is lost .. move fwd

Seriously?  Despite the rumors, the search box here on the site is not used to send messages to Santa.  It searches the site, and if you had used it to search for "quantum", you'd find many of the dozens of posts that do answer this question directly.

The next logical question is whether Lost Bitcoins are recoverable using quantum cryptography.

Quantum computers and Bitcoin
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/quantum-computers-and-bitcoin-133425

Will bitcoin survive quantum computing?
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1eodjq/

Bitcoin Is Not Quantum-Safe, And How We Can Fix It When Needed
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/6021/bitcoin-is-not-quantum-safe-and-how-we-can-fix/

Will quantum computing kill cryptography?
http://mathoverflow.net/questions/128176/will-quantum-computing-kill-cryptography

I haven't found a direct answer to the question so far.

The bitcoin network is already at 10 PH/s, and you think that another power of 10 is all it takes to destroy SHA-256? Considering that it takes the 10 PH/s bitcoin network 10 minutes to guess just a 62-bit hash, how long would it take a 100 PH/s network to guess a 256-bit hash?

I can answer that:

25,108,406,941,546,723,055,343,157,692,830,665,664,409,421,777,856,138,051,584 minutes.

Nothing is impossible if you have enough time, energy and processing power.

I am hesitant to send this argument further into absurdity.... but about 20 years ago mathematical physicist named Frank Tipler came up with a model for a computer that had infinite processing power, time and energy. His discovery may have cracked him up because he realized the computer could be "god" (or something like that). I won't speak to Tipler's religious beliefs, but the "Omega Point Theory" has been peer reviewed by Oxford professor/ quantum theorist David Deutsch: http://129.81.170.14/~tipler/physicist.html (see http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+David+Deutsch/0/1/0/all/0/1)
http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/al/people/Deutsch.htm

In brief, Tipler's model says that it is possible for conscious beings to purposely engineer the collapse of the universe, and that the collapse can be balanced to produce infinite time and energy to be used for an infinite amount of information processing. In other words, this is a closed universe deriving energy from an infinite, organized collapse.

I think it might be possible to create an "Omega Point"-like quantum computer that can solve ANY crytographic puzzle with brute force time and processing power and that would be instantaneous from our point of view. 2^256 is doable if all you have is time and an unbreakable calculator. The Technological Singularity might be able to figure this out on its own.

http://129.81.170.14/~tipler/summary.html

Some of Tipler's peer-reviewed articles:

http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+Tipler+AND+Frank+J/0/1/0/all/0/1

The Ultimate Future of the Universe, Black Hole Event Horizons, Holography, and the Value of the Cosmological Constant
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0104011

Closed Universes With Black Holes But No Event Horizons As a Solution to the Black Hole Information Problem
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0003082

I'm on twitter all week... https://twitter.com/werneo

Yeah that is nonsense.  2^256 is bigger than you think.  Not kinda bigger than you think asinenly bigger than you think.

If you converted the entire planet into a super computer and powered it by the sun you couldn't COUNT to 2^256 before the sun burned out, there isn't simply enough energy.  Of course that is doing something fantastical like building a perfect computer (one at which higher efficiency violates the laws of thermodynamics) and capturing the entire energy output of a star.   That isn't finding a collision that is just counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 .... 2^256.   

Bitcoins are never lost... they are always there... you just lose access to them.

Sorry, but with 100PHs network, you can easily "guess" a collision of sha-256, or guess a collision of a collision of a sha-256.

If it were 1:999999999999-trillion-trillion-trillion to find 1 collision... You could find it in 1 try, on some address on the network, just as easily.

Now 256-bits is only 32-bytes, represented as 64-bytes as HEX-values.
EG: "BOB" = 54fcf974eabb0444320acd2835977b2c686b916162e6571668ac45db549da031

A collision for that could be the hash for the word "SUE", or "FRED", or "CAT", though that is hashed again.
EG: 54fcf974eabb0444320acd2835977b2c686b916162e6571668ac45db549da031 => 96faee69f068c221ad557cbba0c0e7afdd9d3a18ffa2d81f2290d72e2818111a

Now that hash, which could have been "BOB" or "SUE" or "FRED" or "CAT"... has collisions also, which could be "FISH", or "SNOT", or "PEPSI", or "PASSWORD", or "GOLD"... Multiplied by the number of collisions that were possible from the first conversion.

Thus, now there are multiple more "acceptable" hashes/keys that will unlock any of those wallets. Because you are still converting a single-answer-password into a multi-possible-answer-hash, into another multi-possible-answer-hash.

You can test this with something simple like CRC32, and see that you now have millions of "keys" that are valid, instead of only a hundred, by double-encryption, with the same type of encryption. (That is the real reason the whole project was abandoned.)

P.S. Doesn't take a computer long to create 32-bytes randomly and stuff those values into an off-line wallet to see if it unlocks it. Since those accounts are not being monitored by anyone. Since the whole chain, all accounts, are already downloaded on his computer. Takes but a few seconds to make one random key, and try it on all existing accounts, before generating another random key, and trying it on all of them again.

Why does it seem like 99% of necro-posts are useless drivel based on idle speculation and fanciful imagination rather than well thought out logic based on facts and reality?

No.  Please do some research instead of asking why not.

The question of "Lost bitcoins" was raised in this recent article on Read/Write:
http://readwrite.com/2013/12/30/bitcoin-may-fade-2014-prediction

"a full 64 percent of bitcoins have never been spent."

Ref: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~smeiklejohn/files/imc13.pdf

Assume these coins are actually LOST FOREVER. In the next few decades, the Technological Singularity is supposed to achieve super-sentience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

If the Singularity follows Moore's Law and becomes exponentially intelligent in a relatively short period of time, when do you suppose it will acquire enough processing capacity to recreate the lost bitcoins?

Double check your math on that...

1 BTC = 100,000,000 Satoshi

If 1 Satoshi = $0.01, then 1 BTC = 100,000,000 X $0.01 = $1,000,000

So, for a "Satoshi" to be worth on penny, we would need bitcoins to be valued at ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

For a "Satoshi" to even be worth one penny, which is the smallest unit of a dollar, we would need bitcoins to be valued at TEN MILLION DOLLARS. This is ludicrously high. Some countries don't even use pennies, like New Zealand. Considering our inflation, by the time we have 10 million dollar bitcoins, 1 cent will be even more completely worthless than it is now, pushing to limit to a 10 cent saroshi.Keep in mind, even though the dollar has a lower limit of 1 cent, finance and accounting still trades and deals with fractions of a cent. This is also possible with a bitcoin lower limit. You can make up any division of any currency by arithmetic necessity in accounting.

lost coins go straight to my wallet. Just thought you should know.

Of course there is a small possibility that the algorithms themselves could succumb to new technology and new understandings, such that finding the private key for a given hash of a public key does not require brute force calculation of all keypairs until a matching one is found.

Bruce Schneier