Chances Of Guessing a Bitcoin Private Key
Here is a question for any mathematicians and/or cryptologists out there:
What is the chance of guessing the private key of a bitcoin address?
One answer Ive seen on Bitcointalk.org states it nicely:
“If you can find a computer capable of testing 7778752908943661823213959165079225774884848073919 hashes a second and you manage to live for 13.7 billion years you might stand a chance.”
From Wikipedia
Breaking a symmetric 256-bit key by brute force requires 2128 times more computational power than a 128-bit key. A device that could check a billion billion (1018) AES keys per second (if such a device could ever be made – as of 2013, supercomputers have computing capacities of around 20 Peta-FLOPS So 50 supercomputers would be required to process (1018) operations per second) would in theory require about 3×1051 years to exhaust the 256-bit key space. 3×1051 is 3 Sexdecillion Years ( or 3000 octillion years ) or
3000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Years
So Not Impossible but very, very, very, very, very unlikely…
Let me know what you come up with.