<p>It's increasing from approximately zero to approximately zero.</p>
<p>Since the starting seed of HD wallets is essentially random, I don't think this helps.</p>
<p>This isn't significant.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-04-21T09:36:40.567Z
2021-04-21T09:36:40.567Z
RedGrittyBrick
<p>No, it's not getting significantly easier.</p>
<ol>
<li>The key space is literally 67 magnitudes larger than the count of all addresses used so far. Even if address use increases by magnitudes it would make effectively no difference.</li>
<li>Bitcoin has no mechanism to prevent users from rediscovering keys except the vastness of the key space itself, so just because keys are part of some keychain doesn't prevent that they aren't part of another. As mentioned above, even discounting billions of addresses gets you nowhere.</li>
</ol>
<p>There are 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,852,837,564,279,074,904,382,605,163,141,518,161,494,336 possible private keys. Compare that to fewer than 1B addresses ever used and about 75.7M UTXOs.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-05-21T11:33:09.107Z
2021-06-20T17:09:22.977Z
2021-06-20T17:09:22.977Z
Murch
<p>Is the likelihood of correctly guessing a private key with unspent coins increasing due to:</p>
<ol>
<li>More addresses being used resulting in more private keys with unspent coins (i.e. higher chance that a random private key might have coins).</li>
<li>The fact lots of people use deterministic wallets (i.e. one could discount billions of deterministically generated private keys if the first 20 are empty).</li>
</ol>
<p>Is this significant in terms of security?</p>

<security><private-key><deterministic-wallets>
Is brute forcing a private key with unspent coins getting easier?
Paulo
# Is brute forcing a private key with unspent coins getting easier?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2021-04-21)

Is the likelihood of correctly guessing a private key with unspent coins increasing due to:

1. More addresses being used resulting in more private keys with unspent coins (i.e. higher chance that a random private key might have coins).
2. The fact lots of people use deterministic wallets (i.e. one could discount billions of deterministically generated private keys if the first 20 are empty).

Is this significant in terms of security?

**Tags:** security, private-key, deterministic-wallets


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## 2 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2021-04-21. Score: 1

It's increasing from approximately zero to approximately zero.

Since the starting seed of HD wallets is essentially random, I don't think this helps.

This isn't significant.


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### Answer by username_2 on 2021-05-21. Score: 1

No, it's not getting significantly easier.

1. The key space is literally 67 magnitudes larger than the count of all addresses used so far. Even if address use increases by magnitudes it would make effectively no difference.
2. Bitcoin has no mechanism to prevent users from rediscovering keys except the vastness of the key space itself, so just because keys are part of some keychain doesn't prevent that they aren't part of another. As mentioned above, even discounting billions of addresses gets you nowhere.

There are 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,852,837,564,279,074,904,382,605,163,141,518,161,494,336 possible private keys. Compare that to fewer than 1B addresses ever used and about 75.7M UTXOs.


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