Why don't you try to find the next Bitcoin block instead of trying to brute-force a private key? There's 12.5BTC waiting for you if you find one, and you may actually stand a chance!
You have a better chance of winning the lottery 4 times in a row, than brute-forcing a (properly generated) Bitcoin private key.

2¹⁶⁰ > 10⁴⁸


Theoreticians use terms such as “negligible probability” and dislike the term “impossible”.  This becomes a real problem when their words collide with non-theoreticians.  It has happened that a man was killed by a flying fire hydrant.  It has never happened that somebody got lucky in a 2¹⁶⁰ search space after trillions of tries, let alone one try—never happened, and for practical purposes, never will.  You should properly consider such a thing to be impossible.

Moreover, as I said, bruteforcing an address with a mismatch between the Hash160 and the checksum has a theoretical probability of zero.  Absolutely zero.  Because it’s an invalid address.  Would you say that the probability is nonzero of bruteforcing an address with a capital letter I, etc.?

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It takes all miners in the world together 10 minutes on average to find a block.  Back of the envelope, at a rate of 8 Eh/s, it should take all miners in the entire world together over five billion trillion years to do 2¹⁶⁰ work.  (That’s with ASICs which only do SHA-256.)  I’ve been talking in Dev & Tech about how 2¹²⁸ work is humanly impossible, and always will be—forever.  It’s what I call “boil the oceans” security, because the energy required would do that and worse.  2¹⁶⁰ is more than four billion times more work.

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Better idea.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

I suspect two possibilities:

1.  Neither the address, nor your search were properly random.

2. You are lying.

There needn’t be any material motive.  Some people enjoy claiming to have done things declared impossible by mathematicians or physicists, as an end in itself.  A few of them put on hoaxes so elaborate, so meticulously executed, that one wonders what they might have achieved if their energies were otherwise spent.  But most are varying degrees of stupid and/or cracked.

Anyway, you seem to have missed that DannyHamilton conjectured another possibility—here put in boldface:


It is not too unlikely that you made the same mistake in executing your “random” search as someone else did in generating keys to produce a “random” address—that you both introduced the same bias or nonuniformity.  There do tend to be both common conceptual errors in implementation, and common use of specific erroneous implementations.  Randomness is hard to get right.

I note you said upthread:


So, maybe you made a mistake somewhere.

I have no way of knowing if that’s what happened here.  But as DannyHamilton said, it is a “possibility”.  By contrast, randomly hitting one of a relatively negligible number of targets uniformly distributed at random in a 2¹⁶⁰ search space may be safely excluded from the realm of all “possibility”.

It is true, however, that the likeliest possibility is lying.  Some guy on an Internet forum makes extraordinary claims which he freely admits he cannot prove “without trust” per below—what is the likeliest possibility?  Lying.  Of course.


It has nothing to do with “the majority”.  I don’t heed majorities.  The content of my brain is not a democracy, and not subject to a vote.

I am confident I know what the sum of 2+2 is.  I would not change my “opinion” of that sum even if I were the only person on Earth to have that “opinion”, or even if it were declared illegal.  So much for majorities.  Although I’m by no means a mathematical expert, I am also confident in my understanding of just how big a 2¹⁶⁰ search space is.  Even if you were to randomly scatter a seemingly large number of potential targets (keys for all addresses controlling funds) throughout that space, the space itself is so vast that it would swallow them without a trace.  Unless, that is, a bunch of targets wound up clumped in a tiny portion of that space.  There are various ways to severely restrict the search space, directly or indirectly or both:  Bad randomness generators, brainwallets, etc., etc.

(N.b. that this is a problem very different than that of finding vanity addresses.  It’s really offtopic in this thread.)


Well, if you can’t prove it, then don’t expect for anybody to believe you.  Is that a problem?  Do you believe extraordinary claims posted on Internet forums, just because some guy said so?  —Just because he seemed to sincerely believe what he was saying, and even explicitly said that he had “no reason to lie about it”?  If you do, I could easily find you a forum loaded with alien abduction experiences, religious miracle testimony, Bigfoot sightings, etc.  Soon, you would believe all sorts of fascinating claims.

What it really boils down to is this:


You made a positive assertion, which you readily admit you can’t prove “without trust” (as quoted above).  This is a scientific question, not a religious topic or a matter of personal taste.  The burden is on you to provide extraordinary proof of your extraordinary claim, if you want for anybody to take it seriously.  I don’t need to explain and explore possibilities of what might really have happened; I have done these things because up to a limited point, I find the discussion to be interesting to me and an educational opportunity for readers (you and otherwise).  Absent any new and extraordinary information, I think that limited point has now been reached.

If you can’t prove what you say, it’s no big deal; I will more or less just shrug and move on.  “Some guy on the Internet said X.”  I will not exactly “shit [my] pants” as you said, nor will I lose any sleep wondering about it or worrying about Bitcoin security.  I know the numbers.  Numbers don’t even know how to lie.  Numbers don’t make mistakes.

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Side note, mentioned for the sake of correctness:


An address can’t have a transaction fee in it.  Fees aren’t paid to an address; they’re the part of a transaction’s outputs not paid to an address, and spendable by the miner of a block.

That's just the problem, how do I prove it? Tell me exactly how I can prove it.

Without everyone in denial watching me as I clicked next on the page until it popped up and said I found a balance. I have no way to actually prove it, like I said I could have owned that address forever.

Unless I found an address with a significant amount of coins that was dormant for a while I can't really prove it.

I'm not necessarily trying to go against the mathematicians or physicist, I am not that retarded.

All I am saying is have some faith, just because the odds of something happening are mathematically 0, if the possibility exists then it's NOT impossible.

The only thing I have to defend is my reputation. Why can't you open your mind and believe?

This isn't a personal attack on you, or the Bitcoin network, mathematics, physics, theory, etc but because I go against your logic I am a liar, amazing.

What's more entertaining is the fact that you keep this conversation going, if I am a liar and I can't prove it and it didn't happen, why continue to explain yourself? Clearly I am a lying nut job, do you typically defend yourself against people like me?

How about this, you prove that I am lying...if I have more evidence than you can provide does that make me the victor? Regardless, I found an address, randomly.

I don't even want to be victorious, this isn't a competition, just someone who did what you think is impossible.

That's not what I did to find it. I generated a random number then I just kept clicking next and then deleting the last number off the URL no real rhythm, click click click, remove last number in URL,  click click, etc.

I have no reason to lie brother and I can't prove myself to not be a liar with this particular claim. You can't prove that you're right either. Does this make a collision theory? Can't be proven right or wrong. Although I found an address.

However, you are correct, this is not the thread for this conversation.

Yes, I did clone directory.io and added balances.
Yes, I participate in LBC.

I never denied any of that and surely that makes my claim even more deniable by association but the only way I could have found it is by being associated with the search.

I'll start a thread about my find, purely for entertainment. I would like if you joined in as you have. Danny Hamilton, you should join in also. I will be in Chicago soon, maybe we can get lunch or drinks or both. On my way home from Australia, probably lying about that too.

I could care less about Rico reputation, I am only associated with him by LBC and it runs on a junk dedicated I use to play with stuff.

P. S.

If you judge someone's character by their trust rating on a website then why don't you trust me?

I got this error:

cc -ggdb -O3 -Wall   -c -o vanitygen.o vanitygen.c
vanitygen.c:26:25: fatal error: openssl/sha.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
<builtin>: recipe for target 'vanitygen.o' failed
make: *** [vanitygen.o] Error 1

How can I fix it?

How many digits long is the page number? There are 1.80925e+75 pages. I'm guessing that you picked a page incredibly near to the start, relative to the number of pages that exist.

Please see and followup-to:  segvan: Segwit vanity address & bulk address generator

Github: https://github.com/nym-zone/segvan


More recent gems, my new tip addresses:

bc1qnullnymefa273hgss63kvtvr0q7377kjza0607

35segwitgLKnDi2kn7unNdETrZzHD2c5xh

Just for  Information:

My Vega 64 water cooled edition does 174million keys per second:) its rly fast!