I wonder how many people fired up vanitygen trying to find the keys for that one large address? I know it would take millions of years, but you never know, you might get lucky.
What you describe is essentially trying to brute force break ECDSA for secp256k1
(the public key crypto mechanism used by bitcoin).
The conjectured security level of ECDSA 256 bit keys is
128bit (source:
http://www.nsa.gov/business/programs/elliptic_curve.shtml).
It's in fact likely to be closer to 2^256, the size of the space of all possible secp256k1 keys.
That means : breaking an ECDSA 256 bit key would take, using the best known
algorithms today, on the order of 2^128 attempts.
That's 340282366920938463463374607431768211456 attempts.
Assuming your computer could try a billion per seconds (it can't, according to the vanitygen
post, vanitygen can do ~20 Million attempts per second on a 6990), that'd still take you, oh,
about 10790283070806014188 years.
Even if you managed to somehow harness processing power equivalent to that of the whole
bitcoin hashing network today, you'd still have to wait about 10 '790 '283 '070 years.
That's 10 billions years.
In other words, chances are you'd witness the heat death of the universe before you actually
"get lucky".
So....give it a try?
Sometimes a simple "no, silly" speaks louder than eloquent, precise logic
Enjoyed your post!
