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It seems suspicious. Bitcoin cryptography isn't broken, AFAIK, so chance to randomly break into any real wallet should be almost non-existent. I think, they either lying or exploit something different, like RNG weakness.



They're cracking a challenge with intentionally weak keys.

They're not cracking addresses generated by normal wallets.

For example, here's a challenge that gets increasingly hard that you can use to see how efficient crackers are: https://blockchain.info/tx/08389f34c98c606322740c0be6a7125d9...


This explains the approach in more detail: https://lbc.cryptoguru.org/man/theory


This is confusing to me. The link describes narrowing the search space to ~136.17bit, but that is still far too large to be tractable. Do they get an additional birthday bound on that somehow? 68 bits would not be insane, but I don't really understand what's going on here.

I highly doubt they found a collision with a probability of 2^-136, unless they exploited some kind of bad RNG bug (in which case the probability is much higher, of course).


No birthday bound. The keyspace reduction is based on the number of addresses with a balance.




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