Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: BitCrack - A tool for brute-forcing private keys
by
NotATether
on 16/01/2021, 23:05:01 UTC
if I understood correctly you have P2SH addresses in the list
they start with "3"
BitCrack does not accept them

That's because "3" addresses are all P2SH addresses which are the RIPEMD160 hashes of a script. The addresses that haven't encoded a segwit script that is. Bitcrack's using a bloom filter that can quickly check if a hash of a private key matches a bunch of RIPEMD160 hashes of the input addresses (that's why it's more efficient to put many addresses in the input file at once).

A script is not generated from random bytes like a private key (according to this pictograph), but it's just a redeem script anyway if we somehow were to obtain the public script for such addresses, or guess what kinda math problem someone would make into a redeem script, then only the solution to that problem  (which is sometimes very easy) has to be brute-forced to spend the input, and bitcrack is completely incapable of doing because it works in terms of private keys.

But it should be possible to brute-force bc1 addresses since those also use private keys, if that's not implemented that'll make yet another good science fair project or even a Google Summer of Code project  Grin