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Sleeping beauty bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2 billion
(www.morningstar.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Bitcoin private keys are 256 bit long. That means, there are 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 (1.15*10^77) possible private keys.
Say you are using a bitcoin miner that's roughly 4x as fast as the curretly fastest one at 1PH/s (1*10^15), they you'll need roughly 1*10^62 seconds or 3*10^54 years.
Lets say you got a million of these miners, then you are down to 3*10^48 years, or 2*10^38 times as long as the universe has existed.
I was going to calculate how much electricity this would consume and how expensive it would be, but the answer to that is plainly "too much to imagine".
Purely hypothetically speaking, but, what if someone had their own private Dyson Sphere generating electricity? (Asking for a friend.)
The power consumption would be 5*10^62 Wh.
The sun outputs 3.9*10^26 W. If you captured all that energy with 100% efficiency, you would need 1.3*10^36 hours or roughly 1*10^22 times the age of the universe to collect enough energy.
That's incidentally roughly the estimated number of stars in the universe.
So if you put a dyson sphere around every star in the universe, right after the big bang (ignoring that stars didn't form instantly after the big bang) and you ran them until today, then you'd have just about enough energy to crack one wallet with current tech.
Yeah, my password was Hunter2 Username: Username
Yeah that's if you were to try to bruteforce the entire keyspace one key at a time. Nah. You'd look for sidechannel attacks which could reduce the keyspace by many orders of magnitude before starting.