390 sats \ 2 replies \ @nout 26 Jan \ on: Someone calculated a fitting private key to my sole Bitcoin-adress bitcoin_beginners
Be really careful right now if you have someone telling you this. There are multiple ways how this could be a scam to trick you into giving them your seed or private key.
You may get fake email, or fake chat from a "friend" that tries to scare you.
In general no one can guess your private key unless you make some mistake and leak parts of your key (e.g. via using hacked software, storing it on your online connected device, etc). They can also try tricking you by modifying the website that shows how much bitcoin you have or similar.
In the case where you believe that they actually may be in possession of your private key (again that they in some way stole from you, hacked your machine, or you used hacked software...), first take a breath. Don't do any panic induced actions. Don't follow the steps they are telling you.
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Strictly hypothetically speaking, if someone found one of the¹ private keys that match your address, they can spend your funds.
¹P2PKH, P2SH-P2WPKH, and P2WPKH use a cryptographic hash function with a 160-bit result to form the address. Since there are just shy of 2^256 private keys, for each of these addresses there exist about 2^96 private keys that can spend the funds. Luckily 2^160 is still an humongous number and a collision is astronomically unlikely given the key generation was reasonably random.
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