Bitcoin vulnerability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784994

by txgpu • 13 years ago

5 9 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What if I use bitaddress.org to create 30000 addresses 200 times. Then I use a script to check if any of these addresses have been used on the network. If they have, then I have their private key.

Then I will make this script open source if its not really a vulnerability.

mschuster91• 13 years ago

This is futile, the collision chance is unlikely low - the only thing that IS worthwile is doing dictionary attacks on brainwallets!

amish3• 13 years ago

Some basic calculations (based on creating 30000 bitcoin keys per second) tell me it would take you approximately 1.2239x10e60 centuries just to get through 1% of all possible addresses.

Math is fun.

yen223• 13 years ago

You don't have to go through all possible addresses, you just need to find one that exists, no? Although my gut tells me that's not going to make much of a difference in terms of the size of the search space.

wikwocket• 13 years ago

The point is that there is a staggeringly large amount of possible addresses, and that this space is incredibly sparsely populated by actual wallet addresses. You could generate an enormous amount of addresses looking for bitcoins, and not even come close to likely to finding any.

amish3• 13 years ago

To put this into perspective, the universe is only approximately:

13.798±0.037×10e9 years old

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe

amish3• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, I misspoke. Not centuries. 1.2239x10e60 millennia.

wiml• 13 years ago

With a factor of 10^60 in there, the difference between a century and a millennium is down in noise anyway. :)

sidko• 13 years ago

You should try it, and update us with how many Bitcoins you were able to get this way :)

phaed• 13 years ago

I believe you accidentally some math. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack by checking every atom in the known universe.

Bitcoin vulnerability

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