Big Barry Bitcoin on Nostr: #AskNostr I've been trying to figure out a visual exercise to help really seal in the ...
#AskNostr
I've been trying to figure out a visual exercise to help really seal in the "will someone find my private key if they keep guessing" problem.
Obviously, the 3brown1blue video about SHA256 is amazing. The best I've seen yet, but I have an add-on:
I want you to imagine a large piece of paper:
```
.
```
It is wide and long.
There is that small dot, that is the cumulative size of all of the private keys that will ever be created in a million years.
Of course, our private keys are RANDOM, and random sounds cool, but it is cooler than you can imagine.
Random means that our keys are spread across the whole page, each individually so small, that the page just looks blank. Individual keys are so small that they don't show as dots, even if you used a magnifying glass.
No single key is even a physical inch from another in that space.
If we started from a single point and tried to do a spacial search for the next closest key, it would be outside the observable universe... By that, I mean that we would waste an infinite amount of time exploring in precision, discovering blank after blank and never discovering a used key.
If we tried to use a random method, we would also hit blank after blank.
Random has this interesting property where it treats every location it could ever hit as an equal chance.
We just established that every key that anyone might ever create (including random guesses trying to find existing keys) in a million years is barely a visible dot. The chance that any single guess would hit a BLANK space is just so high, it is basically guaranteed EVERY-SINGLE-TIME.
This extraordinary mathematical phenomenon is used in many places for many things, not just bitcoin, and we have never observed a collision for a 128 bit number space and it is theorised that it would take hundreds of millions of years of constant guessing to EVER discover a single key twice (and even then, it would probably just be a rediscovery of one of your guesses, an unused key, so it would be a useless discovery).
Let me know if that analogy helps. 🚀
I've been trying to figure out a visual exercise to help really seal in the "will someone find my private key if they keep guessing" problem.
Obviously, the 3brown1blue video about SHA256 is amazing. The best I've seen yet, but I have an add-on:
I want you to imagine a large piece of paper:
```
.
```
It is wide and long.
There is that small dot, that is the cumulative size of all of the private keys that will ever be created in a million years.
Of course, our private keys are RANDOM, and random sounds cool, but it is cooler than you can imagine.
Random means that our keys are spread across the whole page, each individually so small, that the page just looks blank. Individual keys are so small that they don't show as dots, even if you used a magnifying glass.
No single key is even a physical inch from another in that space.
If we started from a single point and tried to do a spacial search for the next closest key, it would be outside the observable universe... By that, I mean that we would waste an infinite amount of time exploring in precision, discovering blank after blank and never discovering a used key.
If we tried to use a random method, we would also hit blank after blank.
Random has this interesting property where it treats every location it could ever hit as an equal chance.
We just established that every key that anyone might ever create (including random guesses trying to find existing keys) in a million years is barely a visible dot. The chance that any single guess would hit a BLANK space is just so high, it is basically guaranteed EVERY-SINGLE-TIME.
This extraordinary mathematical phenomenon is used in many places for many things, not just bitcoin, and we have never observed a collision for a 128 bit number space and it is theorised that it would take hundreds of millions of years of constant guessing to EVER discover a single key twice (and even then, it would probably just be a rediscovery of one of your guesses, an unused key, so it would be a useless discovery).
Let me know if that analogy helps. 🚀