Topic: Private key (privkey) hunters - unite! - page 2. (Read 15298 times)

That's not what a collision is, a collision is two separate generators generating the same private key that points to the same address. Not two different keys pointing to the same address. The private key is the root of an address. The address is simply the hash of that private key.

There's only one way to prove a private key collision: show 2 different private keys that both produce the same address. Nobody has been able to do that yet.

You can't brute-forcing a random private key. The only way to find it, is if it's not really random (or if someone leaks it).

Yeah it can happens but it's not common (how do you define common btw?).

Phishing give you better odds than looking for private key. But for sure if it's just for fun, let's try to find an address with 0.11111 BTC in it!

The point isn't to brute force in attempting to crack a single address, it's to use an algorithm that generates random private keys and the possibility is still there that on the very first try the key can be one that is tied to a large bitcoin address. I've done it and am doing it and have generated some addresses that match with already created addresses that have been used and a couple that have had small balances in them so it's not like it never happens. The only thing that makes it not so noteworthy is that it hasn't been tied to an account with 50+ btc or something, but the odds that I and others even reached one with an already used balance proves that private key collision is a common occurrence even given the trillions to 1 odds.


 

If I had what your username says, I tried it

But the question is, would you entirely devote yourself or simply seek out keys for lifetime? 

Your choice yet each people do have different views on this and we do have our own minds on what would be the actions we should do.
You'll soon realize on what we are trying to say.

Everything that can happen, will happen. And finding a private key with a balance can happen, however small the chances are. Therefore it will happen. The odds are small but that doesn't make it impossible, I don't think that people seem to understand that just because the odds are greatly against the possibility of it happening it doesn't mean that someone on their first try on keys.lol can type in a random number and find a wallet with a huge balance attached to it. I personally have created a webscraper running that randomly check private keys so if I never find anything major it's cost me basically nothing but the time it took to create the scraper which was only a few minutes. Not even electricity as my pc runs 24/7 anyway

What are you going to do with there private keys?
You should not think that you can steal any coin from just guessing other people private keys because in wallet generators, after number one is not number two. So that this kind of action is such a waste time.

Maybe there are people still hunting, but I gave up in 2017. 

@Flangler  - Not pointless? Well I do hope you have enough computing power, and the lotto comparison? Nah, finding a BTC private keys is way more difficult so the odds is far more difficult as compare to winning a lotto.

actually with 2017-18 increased adoption and market filling with newcomers there has been an increased number of people who started wasting their time "searching" for private keys they can "steal"! i usually see new projects on GitHub's explore popping up

take the odds of winning a lottery, divide them by millions. then divide that result by millions, and continue calculating that for the rest of your life. you still haven't come close to the odds of finding a private key with a balance in it.

I just started private key hunting a few days ago when I realized that BTC key generation is only pseudo random. It instead generates similar keys based on what keys have already been generated and used (this is where I realized it can be exploited). Why it does this I'm not sure, but it does nonetheless. Not going to give much more information until I make a large profit myself as I said I only realized this a couple of days ago. I've already found hundreds of keys with transactions in the past, and a couple with actual balances (dust).

It is not pointless. The odds for lotto lottery also are very small yet people stiil keep winning.

For sure there are still people who do strive and hoping to get some jackpot into those wallets who do have balances but i do think

that most of them completely stop yet its pointless on hunting out btc private keys that do have corresponding balance considering on the odds.
You will find yourself on finding these keys for eternity 

It's now May 1 2019, anybody still hunting BTC private keys?

Hi how are you ? I saw your post about the bitcoin private key, I am a bitcoin fan and I wanted to work with you.
Thank you !

I count 8 seconds before the first attempt to take the funds.
What I don't get though, is why it confirmed the transaction with 152.47 sat/B, and not the older transaction with 446.43 sat/B! Miners are supposed to take the highest fee.

Here's a genius who figured posting his/her private key on Twitter seemed like a good idea.



Reference:
https://twitter.com/_pronto_/status/821072274442829824


Posted on January 16, 2017. Looks like it survived for 20 minutes, before being spent, hopefully by its owner, but who knows:

https://blockchain.info/address/1EmoMxgGMr1KdYNQVzfs7u6YJYBoR2C3Nj

Bravo.

Wait a minute. I'm not talking about randomly generating private keys like


and luck out a la (Powerball)^128. We all know the odds for finding a positive balance address that way is practically close to infinity, even if you had the computational power to check a billion addresses per second.

I'm talking about way to significantly reduce the entropy. Or completely remove it, such as finding images of paper wallets that people frequently - those were the days - used to share on Instagram, Imgur, Flickr and so forth.

Take this one, for example. It had more than 2 BTC in October 2015:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/files/2014/11/IMG_20141027_185706.jpg&w=1484

Another way is (was) brainwallets, maybe the stupidest contribution to the bitcoin ecosystem. A famous example is sha256sum("mike") that gives (I'm by no means taking credit for this one):


https://blockchain.info/address/144BBhjaTofkGJzCG7opHyG5t5HP2boUXc

After the 2016 release of brainflayer and this instructional video (recommended viewing!), I assume every possbile and impossible wordlist has been used to sweep the blockchain clean of brainwallets, in a global script kiddie joint venture.

However, I might take credit for


which leads us to this Ethereum address


https://etherscan.io/address/0xe0fc04fa2d34a66b779fd5cee748268032a146c0

which was active only 57 days ago.

Ethereum is perhaps even more interesting than bitcoin, because of tokens and smart contracts, some of which you can easily dump on exchanges. I simply assume lots of people are sweeping low entropy ETH addresses for such tokens.

My main point is that there are other and much less explored methods, that I work on for time to time when I have some spare time. I'm done with brainwallets and Google Image, but still have one or two aces up my sleeve.

It would be cool to hook up with others who are into the same thing. I'm fairly certain you are out there. Step forth!

I figured this is what you were getting at, point taken.


That's not very fair, in our context! That would be similar to leaking your Private Key, and the person using it claiming to have found it randomly (seems to be the case more often than not).


Blasphemer!
If a concept is valid and unaccounted for, then I have no problem with you "making it up". I was just genuinely puzzled at the concept.


I was unaware of your prophetic abilities, Mr. Loyce. Help me peer into the nether and see what is and is not to happen.


Easy enough, credit cards are 16 digits with 10 possibilities per digit. Maybe the math is easier than I thought, fair enough.


Are you hitting on me, Loyce?


Oh, well than that changes everything. I'm talking more about acquiring a Private key, rather than a collision; I'm not technically inclined enough to comment on that, yet.

I clearly don't live in a Powerball country, I was assuming it uses tickets.
Anyway, the same applies: the chance that you win is small, but the chance that someone wins is quite large (I don't know the details of the lottery).
For the sake of argument, let's say the chance that someone wins is 10%.
For Bitcoin, even if a billion people search for collissions, the chance that someone finds one is stil 0.00000000......0001%.
That's what makes it so unlikely to ever find one.
In the Powerball lottery, a large part of the search space is covered. In Bitcoin, only a very small fraction is covered.

I was thinking about finding a ticket. I think it's a safe assumption that some tickets are lost, out of millions of tickets. Let's put the chance of finding a ticket at 1 in a million, that still makes it billions times more likely to win with that ticket than finding a collision.

I may have made up the difference for the sake of argument. Real chance: it won't happen. Theoretical: it might happen. But the chance is so low that you can safely say it won't happen anyway (I read someone else explain this better once).

1 in 10^11 if you don't know my country
1 in 10^16 for my creditcard
About 100% for calling at the right time.

No, you can never prove you found them independently. A collision means having two private keys that both produce the same address.