Ask HN: Is it good to conduct a transaction after creating a crypto addresss? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it good to conduct a transaction after creating a crypto addresss?

1 pointsigmaprimus1 comment

I know it is customary to not give an empty wallet or purse, you never open an bank account with nothing in the account! Regarding BTC addresses or any other crypto...,Is there a vulnerability in generating a crypto address for payment, then losing possession due to another transacting on that generated address before the keys have been written (or broken) to the blockchain? For example the entity you provide the address to for payment?

Also, I may have access to a few cycles on Dwave unit and can finance a couple terrabytes of AWS BRACKET data to load a blockchain for a PoC if what I am saying makes sense and you are interested in breaking/exploiting blockchains.

PS: As a PoC exersise I might be able to raise enough capital to hire a few hashing services to prove out a 51% @ttack. If you have an issue with Dwave. Or should I just save my money and wait for the cruise ships to start up again? :P

I'm not certain you understand the nature of a Bitcoin address. It's a 160 bit hash of a ECDSA public/private keypair. They "exist" in the entirety of that gigantic space, but as it's utterly infeasible to generate even a fraction of that space, a non-broken wallet implementation will generate a unique key pair and 160 bit address every time you create a new one.

In theory, yes, multiple people could independently end up with the same public/private keypair and therefore the same Bitcoin address, able to spend each others funds - but in practice, given the keyspaces involved, that simply means there are some utterly broken random number generators in place.

And that's been attacked in the past. Ages ago, "Brainwallets" were a (poorly thought out) thing - generate a phrase, hash it, use that to derive an ECDSA keypair, and, hey, wallet based on a phrase you memorize. Except, humans are horrible at generating random phrases, so various people went around hashing various phrases, checking the addresses, and helping themselves to any funds found (and if I recall properly, enough to have been well worth the effort, especially if they held some).

But trying to brute force private keys on the blockchain (which is more or less what you're describing) is entirely infeasible against a well implemented wallet and random number generator.

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