Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Please take this $16,600,522 before the government gets it...
by
David Rabahy
on 18/10/2013, 04:25:57 UTC
I'm not a computer wizzard but I read somewhere it would take between 1 and 10 billion years for a normal computer to hack a private key, how can anybody take those bitcoins?

http://miguelmoreno.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fYFBsqp.jpg


Teamwork!

Hack a private key = brute force

How many private keys can a normal computer try each second?  Feel free to be generous.  A trillion you say?  Whoa, but ok.  2^40.  How many computers on your team?  Be generous.  A trillion you say?  Whoa, another 2^40.  Wow, every second the team is trying 2^80 private keys.  There are about 2^25 seconds in a year.  So, that first year the team knocks down 2^105 private keys, nice.  So, in the first trillion years the team (we'll call them a dedicated bunch) will get 2^145 private keys done.  Oh, darn the end of the universe is coming up and we are still short by a factor of 2^256/2^145=2^111.  Oh, we're gonna need faster than normal computers and a really big team.