Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Is it possible to guess a privkey?
by
DannyHamilton
on 24/11/2015, 22:11:11 UTC
This search space is so huge its larger than finding one genome in the entire human genome.

Yes.  But that's a bit extreme.

It's sort of like saying that the visible universe is larger than a water molecule.  It's true, but as a comparison it really doesn't really tell you much about how big the visible universe is.

There are less than 25,000 human protein-coding genes.  There are approximately 7,300,000,000 humans on the planet.

That's 25,000 * 7,300,000,000 = 1.8 X 1014 total human genes on the planet (including all the duplicates that children get from their living ancestors).

Meanwhile there are 1.46 X 1048 different potential bitcoin addresses.

That means that if you had 1 billion different bitcoin addresses for each and every human gene in existence in a living human, you still wouldn't even be close to finding a working private key for a given bitcoin address.

The average human being is made up of approximately 37.2 X 1012 living cells.

That means that if you cut up all the living human cells on the planet, and extracted all the genes from every cell, and had 1 billion different addresses for each and every gene from each and every cell...

37.2 X 1012 * 7.3 X 109 * 25.0 X 103 * 1 X 109 = 6.79 X 1036

You still wouldn't have even 1% of 1% of a chance of having found a working private key for a given bitcoin address.

If you repeated that same process on a million planets that were all populated with 7.3 billion humans just like us, you'd have 4.96 X 1043. You still wouldn't have a 1% of 1% chance of having found a working private key for a given bitcoin address.