Home Cryptocurrency Bitcoin Mining Bitcoin Mining Bitcoin transactions are not verified instantly – that would be a foolish (and near impossible) thing to do.Instead, they are verified in something called blocks.The network and protocol is set up so that users that do something called mining can find a block roughly every 10 minutes.Once the transaction is included in a (well, 1-6) solved block(s), the transaction is considered verified.Hold up – Mining?Well – Bitcoin is something called a deflationary currency.Miners are people who run bitcoin mining software on computer hardware.What this mining software does is a complicated process – but essentially it tries to perform a brute-force on a SHA-256 hash.The miner who finds a matching hash creates a block, and the miner is rewarded a certain amount of new bitcoin as a reward.It seems nuts, but they’re not trying to match for the whole hash, only parts of it – and that’s how the difficulty is adjusted over time.

Hold up again – adjusted over time?Why must mining be so complicated… It’s actually fairly straightforward – it’s just a fairly dynamic and slightly random process.Once a miner finds a block – that is they find a matching hash that creates a new block – they are given a reward for their efforts.This reward is hardcoded into bitcoin based on how many blocks have been created previously.As blocks will roughly be found every 10 minutes (the difficulty of the hash matching is adjusted every so many blocks to ensure this) bitcoin uses how many blocks have been made so far to determine the reward.The reward started at 50 BTC when bitcoin first came around in 2008, and will slowly half every 4 years until it reaches zero for a total of 21 million bitcoins in existance.For this reason, bitcoin is considered a Deflationary Currency.Couldn't everybody put in random private keys, look for a balance, and send to their own address?Short version Yes, but finding an account with a balance would take longer than the universe...so...no.

Long ELI5 Version Ethereum is based on Public Key Cryptography, specifically Elliptic curve cryptography which is very widely used, not just in Ethereum.Most servers are protected via ECC.bitcoin atualBitcoin uses the same, as well as SSH and TLS and a lot of other stuff.litecoin nvidiaThe Ethereum keys specifically are 256-bit keys, which are stronger than 128-bit and 192-bit, which are also widely used and still considered secure by experts.bitcoin dohaIn this you have a private key and a public key.The private key can derive the public key, but the public key cannot be turned back into the private key.The fact that the internet and the world's secrets are using this cryptography means that if there is a way to go from public key to private key, your lost ether is the least of everyone's problems.

Now, that said, YES if someone else has your private key then they can indeed send ether from your account.Just like if someone has your password to your email, they can read and send your email, or the password to your bank account, they could make transfers.You could download the Keystore version of your private key which is the private key that is encrypted with a password.This is like having a password that is also protected by another password.And YES, in theory you could just type in a string of 64 hexadecimal characters until you got one that matched.In fact, smart people could write a program to very quickly check random private keys.This is known as "brute-forcing" or "mining" private keys.People have thought about this long and hard.With a few very high end servers, they may be able to check 100k keys / second.However, even checking that many per second would not yield access to make the cost of running those servers even close to worthwhile - it is more likely you, and your great-grandchildren, will die before getting a match.

If you know anything about Bitcoin, this will put it in perspective: To illustrate how unlikely this is: suppose every satoshi of every bitcoin ever to be generated was sent to its own unique private keys.The probability that among those keys there could be two that would correspond to the same address is roughly one in 100 quintillion.If you want something a bit more technical: These numbers have nothing to do with the technology of the devices; they are the maximums that thermodynamics will allow.And they strongly imply that brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.Of course, this all assumes that keys are generated in a truly random way & with sufficient entropy.The keys generated here meet that criteria, as do Jaxx and Mist/geth.The Ethereum wallets are all pretty good.Keys generated by brainwallets do not, as a person's brain is not capable of creating a truly random seed.

There have been a number of other issues regarding lack of entropy or seeds not being generated in a truly random way in Bitcoin-land, but that's a separate issue that can wait for another day.This environment uses Testnet coins and separate account namespace from our production environment.Information Security Sign up or log in to customize your list._ Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top up vote 6 down vote favorite 1 My understanding is that miners solve complex algorithms (sha256 i believe) and receive bitcoins.With the amount of hash power all these pools get from miners couldn't they use the resources to decrypt a bunch of encrypted information?encryption up vote 4 down vote No.Modern ASIC miners are highly specialized for the "mining" task of Bitcoin: generating partial preimages of SHA-256 hashes through brute-force searching (to be precise, a value that, when hashed, produces a hash with a given number of leading zeroes).

Breaking SHA-256-based security requires complete preimages (ie.a value that, when hashed, gives the exact hash value being sought), and the world's collective mining power is many orders of magnitude too low for this (the current hash rate is 1.33 * 10^17 hashes per second, enough to generate a complete preimage about every 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years) It might be possible to re-purpose Bitcoin mining rigs to break SHA-256 password hashes, since the search space is smaller.The collective processing power could crack any eight-character password in under a second; ten-character passwords could be broken in an hour or two.However, SHA-256 is an uncommon hash for passwords: most people use crypt, bcrypt, or MD5.The mining rigs are too specialized to attack those or any other encryption algorithms.up vote 3 down vote The tools used by miners are specialized circuits (ASIC) which are very good at exactly one task: computing SHA-256 on some input.

SHA-256 is a cryptographic hash function, not an encryption function.Being able to compute a lot of SHA-256 is useful for an attacker only in situations where: there is some secret value S that the attacker wishes to obtain; the value S is part of a space of possible values which is small enough to be enumerated with existing technology (meaning: S is not a random 128-bit key; rather, S is some password that an average human user can remember); and the attacker has access to the value f(S) where f() is a function that mostly uses SHA-256.So, in practice, ASIC for Bitcoin mining may be good tool to try to crack passwords which have been hashed with SHA-256 or a derivative which relies on SHA-256 for most of its structure (e.g.Usual attackers normally rely on GPU, but the ASIC are supposed to offer a better efficiency/cost ratio (otherwise, Bitcoin miners would use GPU too...).An ASIC for Bitcoin mining would be bad at doing anything else than SHA-256, so the "normal" way of using PBKDF2 (that is, with SHA-1, not SHA-256) is unimpacted.

So are bcrypt and other password hashing functions.Salient points: The Bitcoin ASIC show that it is possible, for a given hardware building and running budget, to get substantially more computing out of dedicated circuits (ASIC) than what you get with generic hardware (i.e.However, the ASIC has a huge one-time overhead, when you design the circuit, then go to a foundry and proceed to make a million of chips.Economically, the cost benefits are all in the scaling; you have to make and run a lot of ASIC to reach a high efficiency/cost ratio.Specialized circuits being specialized, they cannot be easily retargeted.An ASIC for SHA-256 has no value when trying to break a SHA-1 based algorithm, let alone anything AES-based.Still economically, generic CPU and GPU are cheap because they are produced by the million because they are generic and thus can be used to a multitude of tasks.Brute force enumeration works only for values which lie in a small enough space of possible values.All the Bitcoin ASIC on Earth won't help you do some brute-force on a 128-bit symmetric key.