Quote from: Totscha on February 19, 2015, 01:20:01 PM

Quote from: Rintila on February 19, 2015, 12:14:59 PM

Maybe I was not clear enough.

By "cracking hashes" or "destroying Bitcoin from the inside" I mean... guessing all or as many as possible Bitcoin private keys out there. (And therefore unlocking all addresses out there, including, for example, hacking into Satoshi addresses)

I don't understand exactly how mining works but I assume it generates something different than private keys?

You cannot use a miner to crack Private Keys, because to crack private keys you have to have an input string that changes over iterations, but mining ASICs are not designed in this way... right?

So based on this, my question is, what if someone designs an ASIC specifically to crack Bitcoin Private Keys? Is this even possible?

We have a new trend rising, of quantum computing, if someone is able to combine quantum computing in an ASIC way, this may generate much much more than 1 TH/s... like 1 Million TH/s or even more.

But if you are telling that people can use miners to crack Bitcoin Private Keys, then my question is different: How long until everything falls apart?

If this were possible somebody would have already done it and Bitcoin would be dead. So you probably want to know why it's not possible. And by not possible I mean extremely extremely unlikely.

Mining (sha256 hash operation) has nothing to do with private/public keys calculations (an ECDSA operation). So 1THs miners cannot try 1 trillion private keys each second. But even if they could it would take him literally from the beginning of time until now (since the Big Bang) to crack one single Bitcoin address.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/how-long-would-it-take-a-large-computer-to-crack-a-private-key

So even if you had a million of these machine (that by the way do not exist yet) it would still take you a dozen or so million years.

Ah... so miners cannot use their miners for private key generation. That gives us more time

Great, but let us consider this:

Lets say someone makes a device able to generate 1 TH/s of Bitcoin Private keys, is this possible with current technology?

How much different are ECDSA operations from the Mining operations in terms of CPU power?

assuming that this is currently possible, it leverages the basic Private Key generation by TRILLIONS, then to crack all Bitcoin Private Keys in 1 second (Yes in one second) it would just required 4 evolution at the same rate of 1 Trillion times.

Lets assume, currently there is the possibility to generate 1 Private Key TeraHashes per second (ECDSA operations)

This is an evolution of 1 Trillion times since Bitcoin is out there.

If we follow the same rate of evolution:

2009 to 2015... Hash Generation evolution / Second: +1 Trillion Times (1000000000000)
2015 to 2021... Hash Generation evolution / Second: +1 Trillion Times (1000000000000 x 1000000000000)
2021 to 2027... Hash Generation evolution / Second: +1 Trillion Times (1000000000000 x 1000000000000 x 1000000000000)
2027 to 2033... Hash Generation evolution / Second: +1 Trillion Times (1000000000000 x 1000000000000 x 1000000000000 x 1000000000000)

According to this thread here, there are 2^160 possible addresses:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24268.0

So if we divide 2^160 with 1000000000000^4 we get about 1 second... (if I'm not messing up the calculations somehow Cheesy

)

So, you see my concern? and this is to generate all possible private keys in 1 SECOND.

Maybe I should ask like this: with current available technology (Considering ASICs and Current Quantum Computing), whats the max Bitcoin Private keys mankind is able to generate per second with ONE central unit of processing?

If we know this number, we may know exactly how much time we have left.