Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: How to steal Satoshi's stash?
by
jonald_fyookball
on 10/03/2014, 19:30:52 UTC
it is infeasible that you will brute force a 128 bit symmetric key (simply requires material and energy on a scale the human race is utterly incapable of).

Cool!

I think people just want to know exactly how infeasible it really is...  It can help confidence in bitcoin.

My thinking goes like this:  if there's 2^128 combinations, then if you could try a trillion, trillion combinations
a second, it would take you 8.9 million years.  I'm just wondering if we can really try that many per second.

It sounds like maybe a lot longer to try a private key than to do 1 floating point operation