Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Layman question: there is no way to brute force access to these accounts?


Yes, maybe, kind of?

With quantum computing it's expected that the ECDSA public-key cryptography used in bitcoin addresses will be broken. However, the ECDSA public key is only exposed when your first transaction out of the address is signed. If you only use addresses once (recommended practice), an attacker would have to break your private key faster than it takes for your transaction to propagate to the entire network in order to steal your coins. It would take a long time between the first cracking of ECDSA to nearly instantly being able to crack it. For example, the first publicly-disclosed attack on SHA1 took 110 GPU-years.

If the accounts listed by the OP have sent transactions in the past and reused addresses (which was common back in 2010/11), it's possible the private keys can be bruteforced in the future.

If not, we don't know the ECDSA public key for the address. Bruteforcing it gets a LOT harder--but never say never.


No, we don't know where the wallets are located physically. I'm not sure it is possible to brute force a wallet even if we did know where it was.

A lot of people track and watch these wallets to see if anything moves, it would cause a lot of panic if these lost coins started moving.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: