Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Brute-forcing Bitcoin private keys
by
mynonce
on 20/11/2021, 20:23:37 UTC
Is it possible (theoretically) to Brute-force multi-sig addresses?
As far as I know the only threat to our multi-sig wallets is the risk of being hacked.
I expect a breakthrough in private key calculation for P2PK addresses in the near future. (Pollard-RHO-method + newer combinations)

In my opinion we have around 150+ millions crypto addresses. And the market cap is 2 trillions USD.
Plus miners are ready to run their machines for any job be it mining or hacking. With Amazon AWS / Google Cloud machines ready to be used by anyone. Personally, I think it is just a question of time. I was thinking about of this issue a long while. The person / groups who will crack an address, they will most likely not announcing it.   
If a person/group can calculate the private key of an address, then it would be best for them to calculate the keys of Patoshi. https://whale-alert.medium.com/the-satoshi-fortune-e49cf73f9a9b These coins (1.1 million BTC) were mined in 2009-2010 and are believed to be mined by Satoshi and are tracked by many. So if they move some of these coins, we will have a worldwide mega alert. But only Satoshi can respond eg. move the other coins to newer addresses. In that case it would be better to transfer Satoshi's coins back. But if there were no reaction of Satoshi, one could transfer more and more. (it depends on how fast Satoshi's keys can be calculated by this person/group)