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Board Beginners & Help
Re: GPU brute forcing an encrypted wallet
by
archaeopteryx
on 09/03/2013, 13:27:25 UTC
You realize if you are successful you could brute force ANY BTC wallet whether you had legitimate claim to it or not.

In other words, bitcoin would be essentially dead, since you could take from any arbitrary wallet.  You would start with the biggest ones, of course, and eventually word would get out, and bitcoin would be officially dead.

So far, since the 2009 release of the bitcoin protocol, nobody has hacked an arbitrary wallet.  This is presumably not for lack of trying.

I would, to quote Justin Bieber, "Never say never," but if you want a way to open a wallet, you might be brute forcing for a long, long time.

OP:

Quote
So I have modified it to brute force based off a base password that I know is correct, so I'm only have to brute force between 6-8 characters which is feasible.

He knows part of the password so has some a priori information to go off of, not like cracking a private key. It still might take a while.