Quote from: Dexed on Today at 01:00:01 PM

Quote from: digaran on August 23, 2023, 01:41:50 AM

Quote from: Dexed on August 22, 2023, 11:10:01 PM

I see puzzles 65, 70, 75, 80 ... 125 are solved. How come?

It's easier to solve a key if you know the public key, when someone spends from his address, public key associated with that address is revealed, this is what Satoshi did with puzzles every 5 key apart, methods such as kangaroo and BSGS can be used to speed up the search thousands of times faster than brute forcing for unexposed puzzles.

That's why you should never keep your coins on addresses with known public keys.😉 ( not that any time soon they can crack 256 bit keys, so every one is safe for a few decades )

But how can you find public key after making a transaction? Because there is only address and after that you need RIPEMD-160 and SHA-256 hashing to find out public key.

When you spend from your address, your public key is revealed to the nodes so they can make sure the actual owner of the coins, the one who is holding the private key is spending those coins, they can only verify that if you sign a transaction with your public key as the proof of private key ownership, then they will process your transaction because it's proven legit.

Here you can convert any address with outputs existing on blockchain to public key, it only works if the address has outgoing transaction.

https://bitcointools.site/tool/address-to-pubkey

If you never spend from your address, then in order to find your public key, one has to reverse engineer rmd160 and sha256 hash functions first and then get to your public key, so they work as some sort of firewalls.