Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 7 from 2 users
Re: There are 2^256 private keys out there: how big is that number?
by
JayJuanGee
on 02/08/2022, 19:29:37 UTC
⭐ Merited by fillippone (6) ,1miau (1)
Question:  Do you, babo, believe that if you had a script that could find people’s private keys, it would be quote-unquote “legitimate” to transfer their bitcoins to your wallet?

The general futility of such an exercise is irrelevant:  What matters here is the intent.
See the topic title: the intent is to show how secure Bitcoin is. That's why I Merited the post.
If I had a script to find people's private keys, Bitcoin would be worthless. I'm glad I can just tell people to try and find a funded private key, so they can prove to themselves that it won't work.

Your summary does seem to fall in line with my assessment too - even though I have been a bit technically baffled about what is going on  and the extent to which there might be malicious intentions regarding actually finding security vulnerabilities (and thus funds from wallets with bad security).   

Of course, red tags can be given at the discretion of the sender, and surely if they somewhat justify their red tag with the support of evidence (and even somewhat logical explanations), then they are less likely to receive counter-balancing or retaliatory red tags from that member or from other members - and maybe in this case, nullius is getting too worked up about his own self-righteous attribution of mal-intent to shoot first and ask questions later, when maybe he should have at least allowed some response or be willing to downgrade such red tag to neutral - potentially if warranted. 

Sure each of us likely have some evil within us and even motivated by self-interest, and bitcoin seems to be designed to grow stronger from such motivations of self-interests - even though surely, each of us are free to beat upon others if we believe that they have loosey-goosie morals... and personally, it seems that I spend a lot of time nit-picking members about some of their language in regards to naysaying bitcoin or supporting seemingly scammy projects that are tangential to bitcoin (aka shitcoins or some other questionable projects), even with all of that, I am having difficulties attributing mal-intent to fillippone based on the way that he has so far discussed this topic of showing, finding and/or potentially exploiting security vulnerabilities, if they were to be able to be discovered..... and surely, it could even be possible that he could consider conceding to nullius in some ways (maybe?) if there might have been some ways in which fillippone might conclude that some of his language might have been misunderstood, misleading and/or even describing malintentions that he had not meant to promote. 

To the extent that I even understand the criticisms against fillippone, I am not even conceding that fillippone had gone too far in the whole context of his attempt to present this matter -  so in that regard, I am not sure whether changing language - or even putting in a disclaimer within OP or some subsequent post(s) would be necessary given the context in which it had seemed that fillippone was attempting to bring up this topic in terms of pointing out various existing or possible bitcoin wallet vulnerabilities.   

Of course, another matter is the discouraging of members of posting potentially controversial material by red-trusting them, and I am pretty well aware that fillippone must put quite a bit of efforts into his various posts, and sure sometimes I find that he gets things wrong and there are all kinds of members, including fillippone, in which sometimes I do not agree with what seems to be their intentions, and even with all of that said, I am having troubles appreciating how fillippones actions in this case rise to the level of warranting red trust in the various ways that nullius has attributed such bad intentions to fillippone, even though I do agree that lack of success in breaking into wallets would not necessarily make the aims less morally repugnant in the event that fillippone did have such malintentions... but still it seems to me that nullius is attributing way more malice to fillippones set of actions than they deserve to the extent that malice can be considered a gradient rather than an absolute.