How is it that more complex keys are discovered but simpler one like 64 have not? i would have thought the ones after 64 would be significantly more difficult/nearly impossible. Is there any reason why this is the case?
Every five txs the public key is exposed. Maybe someone find it with other approach.
There is no "approach". The whole point of creating original transaction is to prove it, and it has been proven solid for 6 years since then.
The "approach" that was mentioned is in the different program used. People have used the "Kangaroo" program to find the keys with known public keys; versus brute force approach for the smaller ranges, i.e. 64 bit range.
Just trying to do some math gymnastics to understand how the previous solutions worked (e.g. puzzle 53, 54, 55) using only bitcrack (not kanagaroo or other methods) and a fast gpu e.g. RTX 2080 (assuming 1 Billion keys generated per second)
Is my maths correct:
I've tried to do some basic maths but i could be wrong (bitcrack does 1 billion keys per second) so it would complete sequences of 14 characters in 10,000 seconds
15 characters in 100,000 seconds (28 hours)
16 characters in 1,000,000 seconds (278 hours) 11 days
17 characters in 10,000,000 seconds (2777 hours) 115 days
However if the above is correct, then how come puzzle 64 hasn't been solved within 115 days? or faster assuming some users are using multi-gpu? i'm sure my calculation has gone wrong somewhere above but not sure how