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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: BitCrack - A tool for brute-forcing private keys
by
HeRetiK
on 26/01/2019, 00:00:38 UTC
⭐ Merited by ETFbitcoin (1)
If you know the public key (not the address) and the first ~ 180 bits of the private key, it is possible to retrieve the other 70 / 80 bits using smarter ways than brute force attack.

Yes, I realize that finding the last bits of the private key would be much easier.
Unfortunately... I know only what I have shown: full addres, and private key with some randomly missing characters.

The address is not the public key. It's a hash of a hash of the public key plus a bit of error correction.

If there has been an outgoing transaction from the address in question one is able to extract the public key from the raw transaction like so:

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/32305/how-does-the-ecdsa-verification-algorithm-work-during-transaction/32308#32308

If there never has been an outgoing transaction from the address in question it's pretty much impossible to get even just the public key.