Large Bitcoin Collider organization accesses Bitcoin private keys through brute force

Golden Finance News - Recently, there have been reports that an organization called Large Bitcoin Collider has accessed three private keys containing Bitcoin through brute force cracking. The so-called brute force cracking here means trying your luck by using an exhaustive algorithm.

It took Large Bitcoin Collider about a year to access the Bitcoin private key. Image source: Golden Finance

As we all know, the private key of Bitcoin is displayed as a 64-bit hexadecimal number (256 bits in binary), so there are 2^256 possibilities to crack all Bitcoin private keys, which is approximately 1.15792*10^77.

The address with the largest number of Bitcoins is 3Nxwenay9Z8Lc9JBiywExpnEFiLp6Afp8v, with approximately 128,439.83709770 BTC.

So, what is the probability of guessing its private key? About 8.637*10^－78. At present, the number of private keys of the entire network is about 13.5 million, of which about 400,000 are more than 1 BTC.

——Even if we regard all 13.5 million private keys as the "first prize private key" behind the address 3Nxwenay9Z8Lc9JBiywExpnEFiLp6Afp8v, then the probability of guessing and getting Bitcoin is 1.166*10^-70.

However, some people related to Bitcoin have expressed different opinions. They believe that brute force cracking of Bitcoin private keys is not a job for humans, but a job for computers. A fast computer can calculate private keys in the billions in one second. They believe that the probability of cracking private keys with computers is still very high.

——Looking at the report of Motherboard, it took Large Bitcoin Collider about a year to brute force the organization to access the Bitcoin private key, and it traversed 300 trillion (3*10^16) private keys. In other words, its computer traversed about 950 million (9.5*10^8) Bitcoin private keys per second on average.

Based on this efficiency, the probability of a computer guessing a winning private key per second is (9.5*10^8*1.166^10-70), which is approximately equal to 1.1*10^-61. Based on the number of bitcoins contained in the first prize private key, the expected number of bitcoins that the Large Bitcoin Collider brute force cracking organization can obtain by brute force cracking in 24 hours is approximately (1.1*10^-61*128,439 (BTC)*86400 (s)) = 1.22*10^-51 (BTC).

——Professionals believe that this calculation result shows that the Large Bitcoin Collider brute force cracking organization uses this kind of guessing method to crack the Bitcoin private key. Even if the brute force cracking organization spends a lifetime, it is likely that it will not be able to get any Bitcoin, not even one satoshi (the smallest unit of Bitcoin).

However, the report stated that the organization encountered three private keys containing a small amount of Bitcoin, and the winning rate was 9,09*10^44 times higher than the theoretical value.