Quote from: gargavaar on December 16, 2017, 01:41:13 PM

Quote from: DannyHamilton on December 16, 2017, 09:31:00 AM

Finding any one of those 2⁹⁶ key pairs is a probability of 1 in 2¹⁶⁰, so it is computationally infeasible to "brute force" with any currently known technology.

I've heard that quantum computing could do it. Is there any truth to that?

Quantum computing is not any better at brute force than a classical computer. (Note, "brute force" means try a value, see if it works, if it doesn't try another value, repeat the process until a value that you try actually works).

Quantum computing, if the hardware ever advances enough, is theoretically much better at factoring numbers than a classical computer, but (unlike RSA) bitcoin's cryptographic functions don't rely on the difficulty of prime factorization.

Quantum computing might be somewhat better at the discrete logarithm problem that protects bitcoin private keys from the public keys, but bitcoin addresses are HASHES of the public keys. There aren't any known quantum algorithms that will make it any faster or easier to determine the public key from the bitcoin address. Therefore, if all you have is the bitcoin address, it still won't be computationally feasible to determine the private key.