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So a few years ago I created a private key by rolling dice. Following the instructions from bitaddress.org, I rolled a dice 99 times and entered the string into the bitaddress.org. Rather than storing the private key in WIF or HEX, I wrote the 99 digit string of dices rolls. However, I changed some of the dice rolls to obfuscate the true private key if someone else stumbled upon the 99 digit numbers. Now I can't remember which digit(s) I changed.

Using Python libraries, I've been trying different combinations/permutations of the 99 digit number. Stuff like what if I swapped two positions or straight replacement of one or two digits. No luck.

Any ideas? How fast can I create keys and check if my key matches my bitcoin address? Python libraries that I have found let me check about 10 permutations a second. How much faster can I do with C?

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A 6 sided die rolled 99 times gives 6^99 = 1.088864372500119e77 possible combinations. This is almost exactly the same key space of a 256 bit private key (roughly 2^256), in other words, without knowing how many digits you changed, it is impossible.

Let's see, if my math is correct, I believe if you changed 1 digit, then you have to try each number 6 times, or 99 x 6 = 594 tries. If you changed 2 digits, then you have to try 594^2 = 352836. If you changed 3, 594^3 = 209584584. That is much more doable and will have less to do with what language you use, and more to do with how you implement it. You can generate the private key, and then the public key and encode it to see if the address matches (assuming you still have the address).

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  • Assuming I only changed 3 digits and using Python, checking 209584584 different keys will take 242 days running 24/7. Any idea how much faster it would be to check in pure C code (compiled language)? Trying to understand if its worth it to learn enough C to get a tester written in C.
    – BitGaffe
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 14:12
  • The page at benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/… suggests anything from 0.52% of the time (1.27 days) to 54% (131 days). Perhaps more valuable is discovering early that it wasn't only 3 digits.
    – Alistair Mann
    Commented Aug 15, 2019 at 19:57
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Your best bet would be to implement GPU to generate the private key.

There are tools like vanitygen on Gihub where you can generate keys using OpenCL libs and GPU or simply use btcrecover tool (might need modification in your case)

The Vanitygen github is here: https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen BTC recover Github is here: https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover Good luck! /KX

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