Oddbean new post about | logout
 So if Dinosaurs had Bitcoin, we'd be cracking their keys right about now? 
 LOL 
 Key cracking is not something that actually takes “progress”. The billions of years estimate is the time to check all keys.

But you could find the key early, or very late, or in the middle of the process.

So you might be unlucky and get your key found in days 
 unlucky would be an understatement, but it's also extremely, extremely unlikely

the only way to shortcut brute force is if you know the RNG doesn't generate random keys but rather there is a pattern, trying those out first can be a days thing but for real any decent entropy key a decade is not even likely