Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 2 from 1 user
Re: What are the odds of guessing someone's private key or seedphrase?
by
BlackHatCoiner
on 04/11/2023, 14:48:41 UTC
⭐ Merited by hosseinimr93 (2)
The odds of guessing someone's private key... Let me put it in this perspective. There are estimated to be 7.5 quintillion grains of sand in the Earth; that's 7.5 x 10^18. Now ignore the shape of our solar system, and make the hypothesis that there are a trillion clones of Earth, spinning around the Sun. That'd make the total grains of sand in our Solar system about 7.5 x 10^30. Stupidly large number there. Imagine if I told you to guess my chosen grain of sand, across this uncountable set of grains.

Guess what. The number of these grains are not even the 0.0000000000001% of the total valid Bitcoin private keys.

Who says BTC keys are 10^77?
They just rounded it down. Yes, total private keys are about 2^256, but if you round it down, it's pretty much ~1.1579 * 10^77.