Ah, so their consumer-friendly description was overly dumbed-down to the point of being untrue.



I think this still fails to account for several properties.



1) The raw computing firepower available in GPU mining rigs. This is not inconsequential.

2) The fact that we're not merely brute-forcing. We're brute-forcing with a known pattern.

3) We don't actually have a keyspace target. This means the more people who use it, the more the keyspace is divided.

4) Those rigs really have nothing better to do, so why not? Maybe you roll the dice and land on Bitcoin Jesus? What's the down side?



Essentially, there are lots of needles in the haystack, we don't care which one we find, we have a magnet, and there is no penalty.



Keyspace is still cosmically huge, but it's not utterly out of reach, as viewed from the perspective of attacking a specific key with an i3....



Maybe this analogy isn't quite right, but it's almost a quantum concept... Why try to brute-force the password to my SSH server, when you can just try every password on every SSH server, and if one of them works, then you know which one after the fact.

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