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Comment by enscr | Hacker News Reader

Slightly different Q :

Say I have a private key with some money. All I have to do is type 'importprivkey <private key>' in a new client and the money shows up (am I missing something)? If everyone randomly starts entering a couple of completely random combinations, is there a finite possibility that someone might simply steal a wallet? Is it like spinning a wheel of fortune?

Found a very interesting analogy here : http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinBeginners/comments/1uhuge/wha...

"Imagine you hide some money in a hole in the ground, and take note its GPS coordinates. Now imagine someone publishing a list of all valid GPS coordinates on the planet, down to 10cm resolution. In that list, there will be also the position of your money."

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There's 2^160 different public keys, the chance of hitting one of this accidentally is so vanishingly small that it doesn't even warrant thinking about it. The improbability of this event is literally the basis of all cryptology; big keyspaces are difficult to bruteforce without unlimited resources and unlimited energy.

If you analyse it as probability it makes a lot more sense than intuitively thinking about it. A login & a password combination can also be seen as a unique string combination and so is 2FA i.e. a 3 string combination. Not really multiple levels of security mathematically.

With 2FA, the string changes each time you log in.

There's a finite probability of landing on the combination of login+password+2FA-string at any given instance.

Finite and positive ;)

Yes, there is a finite probability of just guessing a very fat wallet via a random guess. But there is also a finite probability that a briefcase with a million dollars in it gets caught in a tornado and falls out of the sky onto your head.

I'm not sure which finite probability is larger, but I'm not holding my breath for either one.

The chance of that happening is so small it's not worth worrying about, ever.

Your brain is not equipped to handle numbers on the scale of 2^-160.

I guess I've a better chance at lottery

You have a better chance of winning the lottery twice, getting struck by lightning three times, then getting snuffed out by a wayward meteor.

Indeed, that is way smaller than planks length: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=is+2^-160+smaller+than...

You can't compare 2^-160 with a number with a unit attached- it's meaningless. 2^-160 meters is smaller than the planck length, but 2^-160 isn't.

If your unit is "the volume of the observable universe" you get a pretty large volume (on a human scale, anyway): https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%282^-160%29+*+%28the+...

edit: oh, the units came from the grand-parent post to yours, but wouldn't the correct conversion be "2^-160 earth's surface-areas"? That's actually bigger than the planck area- but still stupid small.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28The+surface+area+of...

Good catch, I just mentally assigned meter unit to 2^-160.

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