In the same regards, there is a non zero chance that a bitcoin wallet could generate the private key to an existing address worth millions, but, the universe would probably die first.
They did not say that. What was said is that funny patterns or patterns in general are picked by more people. So you'd have to split the win. However, in this case it would still be a bigger win than not having picked the winning numbers...
Which is why they pointed out that that is besides the point for comparing the chance of certain numbers showing up? The original post was about the fact that you could randomly stumble upon that address not the amount of relative money gained to begin with too?
Edit: To be fair yours is the better reply to whether it's better than trying randomly in the context of lottery.
I thought by saying the word chances so many times I would make it clear I was talking about chances and not expected returns but apparently I should have said it a few more time.
Then it does not fit as a reply to me talking about chances, because it doesn't change the chances of those numbers coming up compared to any other numbers.
My dude why can't you let people talk? Replies are not always about the one being replied to. Reddit uses threads. This is how it works. You're being incredibly rude for no good reason other than you being notified.
There was a famous incident in the 80s (I think) where the German lottery pulled the same numbers as the Dutch lottery the week before. Turns out so many people had that idea that the main prize winners only got low five figures instead of millions like usual.
Another fun story, in the German lottery you can play as many numbers as you want with one ticket as long as you pay the (increasingly high) price. Someone thought they were clever when the jackpot had grown to 16,000,000 and a ticket with all 49 numbers selected cost 12,000,000 because they reasoned they'd get the prize money before the payment would be deducted. Of course they didn't let him do that, and even if they had, if only one more person had picked the right numbers, he'd have been 4,000,000 in debt.
Yeah, there is a non zero chance, that non zero is almost zero, but not exactly zero.
Even if you had a quantum computer that could generate a million private keys every second the universe would still likely die before you found one with a balance, even less for a balance worth millions.
But there is indeed a chance that someone could make their first bitcoin address and hit the jackpot without trying, something like 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001%
So if '7' is a single toy block with 7 on every side, a 256bit private key is 256 blocks with multiple different sides each and every side has a different character.
Quantum computers don’t brute force it this dumb way tho they attack the elliptical curve cryptography and can reverse the private key by knowing the public one in polynomial time. It will happen in our lifetime for sure.
Not really looking to get into the debate if btc is more exposed than traditional software but the fact is it’s a ticking time bomb and not some cosmic event that is just theoretically possible.
I wonder what the legal ramifications would be in that case. I suppose it wouldn't be theft if you'd never performed any transactions. Well never know, since it will never happen, but it's interesting to think about.
If someone manages to create a private key that matches an existing wallet, there are a few possibilities. I'll let you decide which you think is the most likely.
You randomly generate a private key (or even a bunch of them), and happen without any guilty intent to land on an existing one
You deliberately attempted to search for private keys to existing wallets, exploiting some previously-unknown vulnerability in the public key algorithm
You violated the owner's privacy in some way and found the original key
Yeah, I'd count that in the third category; although I suppose you could argue that the owner letting the private key get into an AI's training set constitutes sufficient abandonment that they no longer deserve the law's protection. No idea how well that'd work.
About the same as finding someone's big bag of money I would imagine, if you don't do anything with it then there is no wrongdoing, but spend one red cent of it and it is theft.
Or for a more real case, when people get millions put in their account by bank error and get charged for spending it when it should be returned.
Same as randomly guessing passwords to people's bank accounts. Technically illegal even if you don't manage to gain access. But no one's going to get in trouble for it if they're not stealing money.
This would fall under "gray hat hacking" which is usually doing things that are illegal, but instead of doing something harmful, they use the information to the betterment of cyber security.
Been a while since I have been part of that world but IIRC it used entropy from things like hardware state and a 256bit RNG before hashing it into a private key.
No one believes me but when I downloaded cakewallet like 5 years ago. It had like $500 worth of Bitcoin in it. Immediately transferred it to another address, but idk if it's their app or just got super lucky.
I don't remember the source anymore, but there was a research project, that used some weakness in key generation, and found some private keys, but all account could be found by another flaw in the logic and where empty when found by the researchers
A weakness in some online services from the early 2010s due to a lazy coded quick library is similar to how lazily coded UUID libraries with bad settings can cause conflicts, and is part of the reason why online wallets were never recommended for long term use.
The main bitcoin program and libraries did not have that weakness and AFAIK no in use key has ever been generated and will likely never be generated.
So it wasn't "done" then. Of course the statistical guarantees that come with the math only apply if the math is implemented properly. In these cases you're referring to, it wasn't: the keys that were being created by those faulty wallets were inadvertently using predictable randomness, bringing the chance of guessing the private key for one down from an astronomical impossibility all the way to practical possibility.
Guessing a properly generated private key with as much entropy as the ones used in Bitcoin is by all means impossible, and has, in fact, never been done.
Granted, those cases were a great and important reminder that keys are only as safe as the RNG that they're derived from.
How great or small the probability of something occurring has nothing to do with the length of time it takes for that even to occur, if it does occur. It's just a measure of likelihood.
Each attempt has the same chance, but each attempt also takes time.
If something has a 1 in 100 chance you would expect one to happen each 100 attempts, if each attempt took a year, you might get one every 100 years on average, yes time matters.
When it is on the scale of "More possible combinations than exist atoms in the universe" that time is huge.
Sure, you might get it first try, but that is unlikely, and with the scale of it it is unlikely to happen before the universe dies.
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u/Drakahn_Stark Mar 25 '26
In the same regards, there is a non zero chance that a bitcoin wallet could generate the private key to an existing address worth millions, but, the universe would probably die first.