Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin puzzle transaction ~32 BTC prize to who solves it
by
mcdouglasx
on 04/07/2025, 00:32:15 UTC
Buddy, here’s the A + B you keep dodging:

A. Toy range vs. real world
Your demo space = 2¹⁷ ≈ 131 k keys.
Hit rate for a 3-hex prefix there: (131 072 / 4096) ≈ 32 possible matches — easy pickings.

B. Actual Bitcoin key space
Size = 2²⁵⁶ ≈ 1.16 × 10⁷⁷.
Same prefix filter: 2²⁵⁶ / 4096 = 2²⁴⁴ ≈ 2.9 × 10⁷³ candidates.

At 1 trillion keys/sec (fantasy hardware) you’d still need ≈ 9 × 10⁶¹ years to exhaust those 2.9 × 10⁷³ keys. Your “67% success” collapses to 0 % in any universe that isn’t a 131 k fishbowl.

Uniformity doesn’t save you; it condemns you: every prefix is evenly packed with an astronomical number of keys. All you did was shrink the pond, hook a fish, then brag you’ve solved deep-sea fishing.

Keep moving those goalposts, mathematics will keep flattening them.

First, you don't need to quote the entire content, just what you're going to answer. This way, you avoid post-to-post content overload; no one is interested in reading the same thing every other post.

Second, as I told you, the search space doesn't matter here. It's statistically the same. If my script uses a low bit rate and wins 63% of the time on average, the same thing will happen using 10 prefixes and blocks of 1099511627776, or whatever size you come up with, as long as the idea is respected.

Third, you're confusing collision frequency with success probability.