Quote from: rico666 on April 16, 2017, 10:22:24 PM

Quote from: Gleb Gamow on April 16, 2017, 08:51:31 PM

I couldn't help but notice that you're now busy deleting or locking down your social media sites. I wonder why that is, Richard. Roll Eyes

You're being paranoid. And the Admin-C idea is several months old. Try harder.

Rico

Okay, I'll try harder:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/65mjm3/bitcoin_wallets_under_siege_from_collider_attack/dgbudsk/?st=j1kfl6t1&sh=53798e72

Quote

It's impossible to find the private keys of existing bitcoin wallets unless they're brain wallets, so this project is a false claim. As we say in cryptography, the probability of this event is negligible.
For comparison, it's more profitable to just use your computer for mining. It's actually also more profitable to physically use your computer as a hammer to physically mine in your garden in the hope of finding gold.

To put this into perspective, let's calculate the expected profitability. Take the space of public addresses, which is 160 bits, i.e. the space's size is 2160. Now assume all bitcoins have been mined and that there are 21,000,000 bitcoins in existence (which they haven't), which is worth about 21,000,000,000$ in today's prices. As the fortune.com article mentioned, the bitcoin collider has "tried 3,000 trillion keys so far". Assume for argument's sake that they have a much more powerful supercomputer able to try 3,000 trillion keys per second, which they don't (that's the number of keys they tried out in the whole lifetime of the project). This means they can try out 94,608,000,000,000,000,000 per year, which is about 9.4*1019 keys per year.

Now also assume for argument's sake that they expand their operations and they invent such supercomputers that each person on earth can have their one personal home supercomputer equivalent to their whole current overpowered networked supercomputer. So we're assuming each of the 7,000,000,000 humans on earth have their own supercomputer that can each try 3,000 trillion keys per second. Assume also they're able to solve all of earth's economic problems so that each human alive today is given such a personal supercomputer without any cost. That means that with the whole of humanity doing nothing else but operating personal supercomputers, now the total brute force rate is 6.6*1029 per year.

Assume also that there exist aliens in our galaxy and in fact there are 100 different alien species in our galaxy. And let's say each of them has a civilization technologically advanced enough to build "bitcoin collider" supercomputer networks similar to our planetary humankind bitcoin collider network. Assume we can communicate with them efficiently. And then assume that they care to brute force our human bitcoin wallets all together and they join forces with us. Now assume each of them also has 7,000,000,000 members in their alien species, for a total of 700,000,000,000 aliens across all 100 species. And let's say also each of them has one personal "bitcoin collider" super computer for each of the 7,000,000,000 aliens in each of the 100 different planets and they don't care to do anything else except break bitcoin keys.

Incidentally they must also have all these computers for free. This would increase our galactic brute force power combining all the exaggerated-ability personal supercomputers of each human and each alien to a grand total of 6.6×1031 keys per year.

Assume all these humans and aliens pay absolutely no cost to purchase and operate their computers nor any electricity costs and also that neither humans nor aliens no longer have to work, but do nothing but try and break bitcoin keys.

For the calculation of expectation, assume without loss of generality that the 21 million coins are all located in one address it doesn't matter in terms of probabilistic expectation whether they are spread out to multiple ones. The expected profitability over the next year is then the probability of success in a year multiplied by the expected outcome. The probability of success in the next year is then 6.6×1031 / 2160 = 4.5×10-17. Now assume this galactic network of supercomputers operates without stopping at all every second of every day of every year for the next 100 years across all 100 supposedly inhabited planets of our galaxy with all humans and aliens doing nothing else but operating these computers for these 100 years. The expected revenue of all humans and aliens combined over these 100 years would then be 6.6×1031 / 2160 keys per year * $21,000,000,000 × 100 years = $9.48×10-5. That is, the totality of alive humans and aliens working non-stop together would earn the whole galaxy a combined expected grand total of $0.001 in revenues over the course of a 100-year period.