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Guy Forgets Password to $200 Million Bitcoin Wallet

johntown

Banned
Good luck. IronKey uses AES256.
I would agree if he was using brute force. However, there has to be a few passwords or variations of those passwords that he is using. Feeding that into the the program can up the chances. Or creating a word list and have the hash program for variations.

At this point even a slim chance is better than no chance.

I would contact top cryptography experts and tell them if they can help they can get like 100k or something.
 

HoodWinked

Member
There's probably a way to duplicate the drive or dump it

then you'd be able to revert the state when the password is wrong, essentially giving you infinite tries.

so you'd need some hardware expert.

though it would be hilarious if he just misremembered what was on the drive and it was something like child porn.
 

Harlock

Member
With the US printing digital money like a crazy, bitcoin will be a very solid option, even with all the variations in value.
 
Can you brute force it given enough time and resources?
Not really. If you don't know the password at all and have infinite retries you need to go through 2^256 possible keys. You'll probably find it after trying 50-60% of those on average but thats still an astronomically high number.

Even if you task every computer on the planet with finding the right key, it wouldn't be enough. Not even close.
 
Not really. If you don't know the password at all and have infinite retries you need to go through 2^256 possible keys. You'll probably find it after trying 50-60% of those on average but thats still an astronomically high number.

Even if you task every computer on the planet with finding the right key, it wouldn't be enough. Not even close.

What about a quantum computer?
 
What about a quantum computer?
Dunno about quantum computers but from a quick glance at google, it doesn't seem possible. At least not now.

Brute forcing isn't the only way, every encryption scheme has weaknesses that can be exploited. I'm pretty sure AES128 has been broken by university students but the key has to have specific properties for it to work so it's kind of useless at the moment.
 
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