Show HN: Coin Spin – Randomly guessing BTC addresses

by coinspin • 5 years ago

10 13 5 years ago

How long would it take you to guess one? 100 years? Does the app actually check to see if you have guessed?

coinspin4• 5 years ago

It would take longer than that to try all combinations. The app logs a message but doesn't attempt to sweep the wallet or anything.

runbathtime2• 5 years ago

It is mind blowing that we can't guess private keys easily, although probably depends on how the wallet is made. Good idea for an app.

anm89• 5 years ago

This video gives a good intuition for that question

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY

coinspin4• 5 years ago

OP here. I made this mostly out of fun/curiosity. The premise of cryptocurrencies is that it's practically impossible to guess the private key for a given address. This just keeps guessing on the off chance that you hit a 1 in a 1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976 chance.

People are naturally bad at large numbers (myself included).

ezekg• 5 years ago

It's funny -- I'm sitting here staring at these addresses thinking "it can't be that unlikely, right?" I know full well it's effectively impossible, but there's a part of me that thinks I may get lucky.

Humans are weird.

dekervin• 5 years ago

What is the state of the art in term of cracking btc address. There is no heuristics that in some circumstances, would ease the workload ?

breck2• 5 years ago

I found this really fascinating. I also love the simplicity of it. It could be cool if your About Modal had a "Next >" button, and each slide would reveal another critical bit of information, like the one you have above about the actual odds, while the guesser runs in the background. In a way you would be getting paid to learn bitcoin.

Also, wouldn't the odds be far higher of mining a block in your browser than of guessing a private key? My intuition says yes.

Thanks! Great stuff.

zikduruqe• 5 years ago

You'd like keys.lol

Amir6• 5 years ago

Out of curiosity where do you get the balance at this fast rate? Or maybe you just wait for a click on the pause button and then hit an API for balance?

coinspin4• 5 years ago

It's doing a batch request to blockchain.info to check the balance. So I generate 100 addresses, fetch them, then show them 1 by one in the UI. Then fetch 100 more in the background. This is mostly to prevent rate-limiting.

Show HN: Coin Spin – Randomly guessing BTC addresses

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