Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Private Key recovery from WIF format
by
btctaipei
on 09/01/2022, 08:11:51 UTC
If the public key of your address isn't known and that address doesn't hold lots of Bitcoin, i would advice you to preserve your paper wallet and make additional backup (address, WIF and position of missing char in the WIF). In future CPU/GPU will be faster and hopefully Bitcoin price will rise so it might be worth to attempt brute-force.



With data from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4453897.msg55552855#msg55552855 and https://vast.ai/, here's rough cost estimation using single RTX 2080 Ti at cost $0.332/hour

Code:
58^11 / 631.57 MKeys/s
= 24986644000165537792 / 631570000
= 39562746805.84185 second
= 10989651.89 hours

Code:
10989651.89 * $0.332 = $3,648,564.4 (about 87 BTC when i write this post)

due to wallet content it is actually this is quite feasible, not factoring in amount of time I must spent to address development related issues...

Issue had now been shifted to parallel almost hundreds, or almost near a thousands of those GPUs so recovery reasonable amount of time.  This require significant retooling of existing tools available and have it parallelized without incurring excessive space complexity penalties.  I guess will be spending quite a bit of time diving into those topics.