how improbable does something have to be before its deemed impossible? guessing the correct private key? 2 people creating the same private key in their wallets? 2 people having the same dna in a murder investigation? what are the chances a cat plays beethoven on piano or writes functioning computer code if it jumps on the keys? can the simplest known life form with 531000 dna building blocks containing 473 genes and each dna has 4 letters a c t and g come about by chance even though the possible combinations of dna exceed the number of atoms in the universe? if you see a house do you say it must exist by chance or that it was designed and built by intelligent design even though you never saw it built? did life and the universe come from nothing or from so called quantum fluctuations? "hebrews 3:4 Of course, every house is constructed by someone, but the one who constructed all things is God." is your god chance or intelligent design?
@@ben-ww7ks Things are only improbable when there are a lot of variants that are picked by one at random. As for the universe - it either was created by god or it wasn't. So from the point of probability it's 50\50. However, the probability that the universe was created by any god humans created in their stories is close to zero.
Andreas, you are amazing, always with the best explanations. Thanks for your massive effort to make Bitcoin, the tech behind and the principles, easy to understand. The crypto community owes you a lot.
I can’t understand how this doesn’t have 21 Million views at least, btw loved the data about the Eddington number it adds to the to the etherial side of Bitcoin. Thanks for the work Andreas 👌
Go to the equator and deal a trillion hands. Take a step, repeat. When you arrive at your starting point remove a drop from the Pacific ocean, repeat. When it's empty, refill it and put a card on the ground repeat all. When the cards reach the sun repeat 3000 times, your private key is in there somewhere.
@@txtpeer5179 I meant Tatooine. However I am happy to concede if you have numbers to back up that Arrakis has orders of magnitude more sand than Tatooine
Great way to explain that. Throw in Ledgers and Trezors Passphrase feature and the number becomes more than all the atoms in every possible parallel universe and dimension. Cheers.
I've got a good one. I did the math on this and this is what I found; Trying to guess a private key, say you could try a key every second and everyone on the planet is too. It would take 75% longer than the universe has existed for someone to guess it. This is assuming of course the are no duplicate guesses.
It was a very similar video many years ago that first attracted me to Bitcoin. Hope this one attracts lots of new Bitcoiners. Very well described as usual Andreas. Would love a follow up with quantum computing. I know you've done some in the past but perhaps one at this basic level of guessing numbers.
My issue with this is no matter how slim the chance is, it’s still security through obscurity. A private key should be compared to generating a username, not the password. In that sense, a centralized entity will always have the upper hand due to simply being able to tell you “that username already exists”. Although there are a slew of other problems with central authorities, this is one that simply doesn’t exist for them (all things being equal). It really feels like a practical (hybrid) approach should be taken when considering how keys are generated for your blockchain even though this is looked down upon as not being fully decentralized. That sounds all fine and well until someone happens to get the same seed/private key as you without being nefarious, and there are no protections against it.
Amazing video! Ever since learning about the wonders of Bitcoin I had this itching question, hearing the answer every time just blows my mind again and again.
I heard the sand perspective before (on all of earth) and I thought that was a lot, but didn't realize that was FARRRRR from the real "visual" of the question. Thank you!
Amazing. I didn’t realize the enormity of the possible numbers. Thanks to you my friend. I understood BTC when I 1st started researching years ago. I’m now jobless, but I don’t care. BTC has been taking good care of my family.
School teaches you math and other subjects just enough so you can do the jobs they need, never to empower you with real inspirational knowledge and skills.
@@tradersendeavors School is one body of information, but not the only one can become educated. Who knows if he learnt the math he used to create Bitcoin from school or from other means like books. I’m not against school because it has many positives, being a medium from which you can learn and form an education, but there is a also a negative side to school just like everything in life has. You can’t forget that school is ultimately a business, a business with interests that might not align with yours. For instance it may be more profitable for school to produce students who will become workers rather then inventors, thinkers, creatives, thus they are disincentivised to develop that entrepreneurial side is student who align more to that. This is one example. It doesn’t apply to everyone, but I certainly felt school didn’t develop me in the ways I wanted and the ways I was most strongest at, I always saw it as meaningless and surface-level means to get a degree, to then work for a company. I dropped out of high-school and became a successful entrepreneur. I remember in business studies we learnt nothing whereas now me running my own business, actually learning practically, not just sitting in a classroom, it’s a whole new world.
This is an amazing video, I've been thinking about the chances of it and now I know it's very very tiny chance but still there is a chance of getting someone private key especially the whole thing is a random process, maybe not now , not in a ten years but there is a mistake gonna happen
2^256 = around 10^77. I followed until 10^52 and I shouted "come on, I don't believe you!".... but I just realized we just do the math here, nothing to believe or not. It just is.
One thing is there is almost infinite number of keys available but another thing is the possibility of the algorithm in charge of generating a key generates twice the same key. i’m not saying it’s very possible but i think the algorithm in charge is very important, must not be poorly designed. In tekken 7 (a fighting video game) when you select a random stage most of the time the same stage appears lol
This is to get your family/friends off the lottery. Tell them about Satoshi's wallet and that there is a 1 in 2**256 chance they will gain access when they create a new seed.
Oh my. That was mind blowing! How many grains of sand was that again😳 Yeah I guess that drives home the message don't lose possession your private keys.🙂
I get that 10 to the 77 is an unimaginably impressive number, but we do have super computers. What would happen if the most powerful supercomputer in the world were to identify all private keys, and then just cross-reference those that have a balance over 100,000$.. How long would that take, and is it even feasible?
If you had access to a super computer capable of checking 1 Trillion ( 10^9 ) per second, it would do 10^10 in 10 seconds, 10^11 in 100 seconds, 10^12 in 1000 (10^3) seconds, 10^13 in 10^4 seconds, 10^14 in 10^5 seconds .... that's 100,000 seconds or 1.15 days... let's just round that to one day ... 10^15 would take 10 days, 10^16 = 100 days, 10^17 = 1000 days, lets call that 3 years... 10^18 = 30 years, 10^19 = 300 years.... after this the numbers really start to get quite silly, and you have still checked way way less than 0.01% of the total available.
Interesting. So would I be correct to say that, if you had an industrial size super computer in Nigeria that was crunching out hundreds of trillions of random private keys every nanosecond, this machine would ultimately steal someone's bitcoin at some point. It would be like mining for diamonds, where you crash hundreds of tons of rock for that tiny precious diamond?
A question from my side about numbers...how big of a chance is it, to find a Hash mining Bitcoin with a Raspberry Pi or the old USB Miner? You could be lucky to guess the right Hash, because It's like a lottery, correct?
Most people use addresses which are 160 bit hashes of public keys. To spend those coins I don't need to know their private key. Any private key whose public key hashes to the same address will do. So I "only" have to search 2^160 = 10^48 = less than one galaxy's worth of silica atoms to steal their money, not the whole universe.
Possible positions in the Game of Go - 10 ^ 180. So all the atoms in the Universe, with each atom having a Universe of atoms inside it (10 ^ 154) plus change ;)
Ok - convincing. But what if the random generator in a ledger hardware wallet, which creates seeds tends to generate certain seeds, because it is not able to generate each numbers with the same probability. Is this completely studied?
By time: If you consider the age of the universe: 13,8 B years ~ 10^17 seconds. Someone (maybe all computers on earth) brute forcing 1 sextillion (10^21) times per second. They would still need some 10^39 (a billion quadrillion quadrillions) times the age of the universe to guess a seed.
It can be done, but should take some time. Not only more than a human life, but also more than the Earth and Sun lifetime. Most probably more than the lifetime of all present and future stars.
Andreas love your work. I think the problem is how much computer computing we have so several amount of people or computers try different keys to check their balance and the possibility to find one
The problem with this example is that it ignores how fast "guesses" can be made. If every inch of Earth were covered in clones of the Google HQ, all using their entire computing capacity to check private keys for UTXO, would one be found before Earth is engulfed by the sun in 7.5 billion years?
![Can Someone Guess My Crypto Private Key? [From Sand, to Molecules, to the Observable Universe]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
