How long would it take to crack your private key? If all Bitcoin miners in the world are against you

First, let’s understand the unit of hash collision.

We have all used USB flash drives or hard drives to store things. The units are KB, MB, or GB. For example, an 8GB USB flash drive or a 1TB hard drive refers to storage space. The full name should be 8GB or 1TB. B is the abbreviation of Byte, which is a storage unit. If Byte is changed to Hash, it becomes a computing power unit. Hash is abbreviated as H.

K=2^10=1024≈1000; KH computing power is about 1000 guesses per second

M=2^10K=2^20≈10^6; MH computing power is about 1 million guesses per second;

G=2^10M=2^30≈10^9; GH computing power means about 1 billion guesses per second.

By analogy, the units are TH, PH, EH, Z, Y, B, N, D, etc.

Your private key has 2^256 possibilities. The current network computing power is 45.98 EH, which means 45.98*10^18 times per second (the specific number is 45.98*2^60), which is 459.8 trillion times. It feels very powerful, the number is so large that it seems that your private key can be guessed in an instant. Don't jump to conclusions first. The possibility of our private key is so great that it cannot be judged by thinking out of thin air. Come on, young man or big man, let's continue to calculate.

The number 45.98 is not easy to convert to the power of 2, so let's assume it is 64, which is 2 to the power of 6, which means the computing power of the entire network has increased by 40%. So let's calculate it based on the calculation that the computing power of the entire network has increased by 40%.

The unit of 10^57 is seconds.

Calculate how many seconds there are in a year, and then calculate how many years it will take.

1 hour is 3600 seconds, 1 year = 3600*24*365

How many years?

That is to say, if these miners are unlucky, they will exhaust all possibilities to guess (collide) your private key, and the last one to encounter your private key will need 31.7 followed by 600 million characters, so many years;

Of course, if the computing power does not increase, after so many billions of years, not only your private key will be calculated, but all private keys will be calculated. Because the possibilities of 2^256 are exhausted, the possibilities of all private keys are also exhausted. Just like what I said in my previous article , if there are 360 ​​earths, and every gram of matter on each earth becomes a new earth, the water molecules on so many earths are the possibilities of private keys .

Although it is an almost infinite number, it has the potential to be exhausted in the face of an almost infinite time. However, this long period of time is not something that a human life or current human civilization can endure.

There is also a bug, which may guess your private key in the first second. For example, if all 256 digits of your private key are 0, we will start from 0 and guess you in the first second. Don't be afraid, this will not happen unless you leak information. If you leak private key information, you really don't need to bother the whole world to be your enemy. A computer or a mobile phone can make your personal assets disappear. So protecting your private key (or mnemonic) is the first thing you should consider.

In reality, it will not take 31.7 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years to crack your private key, because the other party will not be so unlucky as to crack all the private keys in the world and only find yours at the last one, nor will they be so lucky as to find yours at the first one. The time to crack should be calculated in units of 100 million years , and I believe no one will object.

Don't worry, there is not enough computing power against you, even if you have 1 million bitcoins in your wallet.

While waiting for billions of years to crack your private key, this computing power could have already chosen more economical and efficient methods .