Bitcoin vulnerability

5 pointsby txgpuقبل 13 سنة9 comments

What if I use bitaddress.org to create 30000 addresses 200 times. Then I use a script to check if any of these addresses have been used on the network. If they have, then I have their private key.

Then I will make this script open source if its not really a vulnerability.

5 comments

amishقبل 13 سنة

Some basic calculations (based on creating 30000 bitcoin keys per second) tell me it would take you approximately 1.2239x10e60 centuries just to get through 1% of all possible addresses.

Math is fun.

yen223قبل 13 سنة

You don't have to go through all possible addresses, you just need to find one that exists, no? Although my gut tells me that's not going to make much of a difference in terms of the size of the search space.

wikwocketقبل 13 سنة

The point is that there is a staggeringly large amount of possible addresses, and that this space is incredibly sparsely populated by actual wallet addresses. You could generate an enormous amount of addresses looking for bitcoins, and not even come close to likely to finding any.

amishقبل 13 سنة

To put this into perspective, the universe is only approximately:

13.798±0.037×10e9 years old

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe

mschuster91قبل 13 سنة

This is futile, the collision chance is unlikely low - the only thing that IS worthwile is doing dictionary attacks on brainwallets!

sidkoقبل 13 سنة

You should try it, and update us with how many Bitcoins you were able to get this way :)

amishقبل 13 سنة

I'm sorry, I misspoke. Not centuries. 1.2239x10e60 millennia.

wimlقبل 13 سنة

With a factor of 10^60 in there, the difference between a century and a millennium is down in noise anyway. :)

phaedقبل 13 سنة

I believe you accidentally some math. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack by checking every atom in the known universe.