Show HN: Randomly Guessing Bitcoin Addresses

[jtsiskin]

You can save a lot of CPU by just never querying the server, and just assume the balance is 0. I guarantee the experience will be identical

[ourbetterworld]

I made something similar for Ethereum keys :) I decided I wanted mine to be an art presentation too: http://petroff.ryan.gitlab.io/ethkeyscape/

[calrueb]

This is cool, and the linked Medium article helped me wrap my head around the security of Bitcoin wallets. I have wondered in the past why people mine blocks, but not try to “mine”/hack existing wallets.

It would be cool to add a running counter for “X wallets checked” on the webpage.

[Cycl0ps]

I was interested in the idea too and dug further into the math. Assuming you could check hashes at the same rate as Bitcoin is currently mined at that's 202 Exa-hashes per second. If you had the world's hashing power working on guessing private keys, the odds of getting one on any given day are 1/6.70093E45

[coinspin]

That's a neat idea! It's currently all client side but I could add a simple endpoint to store/read the counts.

[DantesKite]

If by some ungodly miracle this correctly guesses a Bitcoin address, would you be notified?

[coinspin]

Yeah. I would log it. It doesn't auto sweep the wallet or anything.

[coinspin]

OP Here. I submitted this 6 months ago as a Show HN and thought I would try my luck again after adding a blog post last night about doing the same thing on AWS.

[rkagerer]

You might also be interested in the Large Bitcoin Collider. It found some weakly generated private keys.

[api]

Not sure if the Sun will remain a main sequence star long enough for this to work...

[mritchie712]

Why is the “top” data as of Nov 12th?

[coinspin]

I just haven't updated it lately. Thanks for the reminder. I'll run the scripts now.