Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: == Bitcoin challenge transaction: ~1000 BTC total bounty to solvers! ==UPDATED==
by
digaran
on 01/09/2023, 23:29:47 UTC
But how whales work with it? Let's choose this address, for example https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/bc1qgdjqv0av3q56jvd82tkdjpy7gdp9ut8tlqmgrpmv24sq90ecnvqqjwvw97
It has a lot of bitcoins, and has no outgoing transactions, so no one knows the public key. But how the owner can withdraw some of these bitcoins without revealing his public key? This is Bitfinex verified address, and they need to operate with this money, but this money just frozen on this address, because they cannot make outgoing transaction without revealing public key.
The first million bitcoins mined by Satoshi have their public keys revealed, million other coins are sitting in addresses with exposed public keys, but nobody is going to find them any time soon, this puzzle is the proof of that, when we can't even find a key with 32 first 0s easily, how can one finds a key with 64 unknown hex characters?

It's best not to use an address with exposed public key for long term cold storage. That's it,  like when they say lock the doors before going to bed, not neccesarily a bad thing to do, after all there is no central bank to hold and keep bitcoins safe, you alone are responsible to keep them safe, now saying to not reuse addresses is a security advice, ignore it, nothing will happen, there is only a tiny percentage of probability of compromise.

Remember, before Satoshi launches bitcoin, he had asked several mathematicians and cryptography experts to test the security of public keys, they all gave thumbs up for launch.