I’ve got a question for the newbies here.
Imagine this wild scenario: some hacker, through pure luck (since it’s nearly impossible to find a private key), manages to swipe some bitcoins from one of the very first blocks (we all know Satoshi mined the first five). Then this hacker, being the anarchist type, goes and signs something like "I found a backdoor in secp256k1 lol".
What do you think the crowd's reaction would be? How can I prepare for something like this? I’m hoping for insights based on past events in economics or finance where something seemingly solid got shaken up.
Thanks!
well the idea he hit a key based on luck is not new.
its meaningless if he does one block by luck . lets say he tosses 1000 pcs at brute forcing a key. and normal luck means 300,000 years for him to hit it. No one would believe he cracked it unless he does it 3 times or more.
The concept of someone hitting 3x 300,000 year events in say a week would mean its cracked by a real method.
so it would need to happen three times really fast.
please note the idea of 1000 fast pcs needing 300,000 years to open a key by brute force is wrong as it would likely take 100,000 pcs over 30,000,000 years to find a key. (likely higher and more time)
Okay, thanks. So it is really improbable. I'm still a bit unseasy to have no edge against the "three times quickly" scenario, but I guess nothing is truly certain.
I think we don't even need a theft of funds from early blocks belonging to Stashi Nakamoto to get a deep crash of the market unfortunately. If someone is able to show he can randomly steal funds of one of the 50 million currently funded addresses, many people could think BTC is not secured anymore and they could dump their coins by panic selling.
I guess that's just the human mind not being capable of understanding these odds... I mean, allmost nothing you've ever considered safe enough so you don't have to edge against it is 100% safe (and it's impossible to have an edge against everything and everyone you ever need/use/have/...).
Is your bank safe? Nope... Personally, i think the odds of losing fiat money in the banking system greatly outweighs the odds of somebody randomly bruteforcing your private key.
Is your country safe? Nope... No matter which country you live in, odds are probably bigger it dissapears before somebody bruteforces your private key.
Is gold safe? Nope... Just a piece of metal... If civilisation collapses, you can't eat gold and it might lose it's value.
Are we alone in the universe? No idear, but i would say odds are much bigger we are not than somebody bruteforcing your private key.
Normally, this is the point where i'd start calculating stuff to make you feel at ease, but chatgpt took over this part for me... I asked it to compare the odds of bruteforcing a private key using 1 million RTX 3090 GPUs for a full year, and compare it to the odds of an individual being struck by lightning AND winning a major lottery AND surviving a shark attack AND being elected as the prime minister of an EU country in the same year... Here's it's answer:
So, it's about 100.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 times more likely that you'll be struck by lightning, win a major lottery, survive a shark attack and be elected as prime minister of an EU country as it is to bruteforce a private key using 1 million RTX 3090 GPU's in one year.
I did not redo chatgpt's calculations, but they seem plausible to me...
Offcourse, as soon as there's a problem with the algorithm creating your private key, things might change drastically... I'm assuming a truely random private key.
And, if a vulnerability is ever found, or technology ever exists that does not bruteforce 109 hashes/second, but rather 10900, we're in trouble... But then again, so will every major banking system, every major database you considered safe, SSL trafic, everything private, everything money related,...
Your hedge against this would be to short Bitcoin. If this ever happens to the Satoshi million (a wallet that is supposedly dormant, dead and does not have anyone with control of the key), it signifies that it could happen to anyone no matter how secure they are, and therefore creates a genuine security reason to not hold bitcoin - and if it happened to the wallet holding 1/21 of the entire supply, the market would enter panic before that 1,000,000 could even start to be sold, let alone the effect it would have if it were to be sold on-market.
However an interesting thing is that the original 1,000,000 BTC is a mere $100,000,000,000...I say mere as there are institutions who would probably snap up the opportunity to buy the original 1,000,000 BTC from Satoshi, not just due to its value but due to its significance. Heck, MSTR wanted to raise $10b to buy bitcoin on-market and BlackRock + Coinbase both have almost 1,000,000 BTC each as well...so maybe the market effect wouldn't even be that devastating in the long run, and the initial 1,000,000 coins going on market themselves wouldn't kill Bitcoin...but the event of them being hacked and what that signifies could.