How hard is it to brute force a Bitcoin Private Key?

chrisj

I am wondering whether anyone can say how difficult it is to just leave a powerful computer running to try and guess Bitcoin private keys. I understand they are only 160bit? Which doesn’t sound the most secure to me. I understand the design in the beginning was such that no attacker would bother taking their chances with private keys if they could just mine Bitcoins honestly but now we have ASICS and the difficulty is so high you could easily do some parallel processing and be mining coins with your ASIC and brute forcing private keys with the CPU that would otherwise be left idle.

Anyone technical enough to shed some light on this? Could this be another argument in favour of Scrypt and a coin like ours which has a team dedicated to the protection of decentralisation.

svennand

hmm
As far as i can see they are using sha256 (256bit) cryptation for the private keys
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key

Im just entered a new course named Information Security where we are actually analysing these types of cryptation.
Will have a talk with my professor there, he’s just beyond Human when it comes to these types of things :D

chrisj

Ahh okay yes sorry I was confused, it’s the public key that is 160bit, the private key is 256. Fine confidence restored.

Thanks so much.

UKMark

One of my favourite blogs on this matter…

http://www.miguelmoreno.net/bitcoin-address-collision/

svennand

[quote name=“UKMark” post=“26019” timestamp=“1377031386”]
One of my favourite blogs on this matter…

http://www.miguelmoreno.net/bitcoin-address-collision/
[/quote]

thanks for that one.
sounded much like the class i had earlier today:P
no wonder my head hurts ;D

chrisj

[quote name=“Simkill” post=“26040” timestamp=“1377082066”]
With upcoming tech like this http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/164301-graphene-transistors-based-on-negative-resistance-could-spell-the-end-of-silicon-and-semiconductors

and discoveries like this http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/164050-discovery-may-make-encryption-exponentially-easier-to-break

It’s easy to see why cryptocurrency will have a hard time in the long run.
[/quote]

The important thing is we stay relevant and don’t get complacent. I want to see Quantum Cryptography and a never ending pursuit of innovation.

svennand

[quote name=“Simkill” post=“26040” timestamp=“1377082066”]
With upcoming tech like this http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/164301-graphene-transistors-based-on-negative-resistance-could-spell-the-end-of-silicon-and-semiconductors

and discoveries like this http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/164050-discovery-may-make-encryption-exponentially-easier-to-break

It’s easy to see why cryptocurrency will have a hard time in the long run.
[/quote]

with upcomming tech comes even better upcoming levels of cryptation.
for instance sha3 (sha256 is sha2)
cryptocoins needs to evolve hand in hand with technology.
which it is at the moment. just look at the coming ACP, to tacle the current 51% issue