Show HN: Coin Spin – Randomly guessing BTC addresses | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Coin Spin – Randomly guessing BTC addresses

coinspin.app

10 pointscoinspin13 comments

OP here. I made this mostly out of fun/curiosity. The premise of cryptocurrencies is that it's practically impossible to guess the private key for a given address. This just keeps guessing on the off chance that you hit a 1 in a 1461501637330902918203684832716283019655932542976 chance.

People are naturally bad at large numbers (myself included).

It's funny -- I'm sitting here staring at these addresses thinking "it can't be that unlikely, right?" I know full well it's effectively impossible, but there's a part of me that thinks I may get lucky.

Humans are weird.

What is the state of the art in term of cracking btc address. There is no heuristics that in some circumstances, would ease the workload ?

I wondered this too. I'm sure you could narrow the universe to some degree. Most wallets use the BIP 39 word list as a seed to derive the private key. So 12 words (in order) out of 2048 possible words is probably less than the total number of possible bitcoin addresses. This is just one example.

I found this really fascinating. I also love the simplicity of it. It could be cool if your About Modal had a "Next >" button, and each slide would reveal another critical bit of information, like the one you have above about the actual odds, while the guesser runs in the background. In a way you would be getting paid to learn bitcoin.

Also, wouldn't the odds be far higher of mining a block in your browser than of guessing a private key? My intuition says yes.

Thanks! Great stuff.

You'd like keys.lol

Interesting! (Though the ads and captchas are obnoxious)

Out of curiosity where do you get the balance at this fast rate? Or maybe you just wait for a click on the pause button and then hit an API for balance?

It's doing a batch request to blockchain.info to check the balance. So I generate 100 addresses, fetch them, then show them 1 by one in the UI. Then fetch 100 more in the background. This is mostly to prevent rate-limiting.

How long would it take you to guess one? 100 years? Does the app actually check to see if you have guessed?

It would take longer than that to try all combinations. The app logs a message but doesn't attempt to sweep the wallet or anything.

It is mind blowing that we can't guess private keys easily, although probably depends on how the wallet is made. Good idea for an app.

This video gives a good intuition for that question

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JGmA5_unY

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