Re: There are 2^256 private keys out there: how big is that number?
Wow this is a serious project.
Basically thousands of distributed servers generating and checking 26 Trillions (!!!) of private keys on a daily basis.
Over the first three years, they managed to find 7 private keys. That’s a lot! I imagined the odds were much lower., but probably there is some kind of bug in some wallet utilising a suboptimal random number generator to create keys. (Further research needed here!)
that is technically incorrect.Basically thousands of distributed servers generating and checking 26 Trillions (!!!) of private keys on a daily basis.
Over the first three years, they managed to find 7 private keys. That’s a lot! I imagined the odds were much lower., but probably there is some kind of bug in some wallet utilising a suboptimal random number generator to create keys. (Further research needed here!)
they are not exactly finding private keys with balance, they are solving a puzzle. a long time ago (2015) in order to show the hugeness of the private key space (or maybe just for fun) someone created a "puzzle" where he chose keys in a certain smaller space and sent increasing amounts to each of those keys like this:
201 send 0.001BTC=$0.2 at the time
212 send 0.002BTC=$0.4 at the time
223 send 0.003BTC=$0.6 at the time
and so on.
now, people to this day are still trying to solve that puzzle. so technically if you have a private key (which is impossible by the way) that is in one of those ranges they won't find that because they are only looking to solve that puzzle.
p.s. a bit nitpick-y but there are 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364140 private keys which is a little smaller than 2256
