Cracking Bitcoin = Challenging the laws of the universe? Human Computing Power is fundamentally insufficient!

Will Bitcoin be cracked? Many people have such questions. We won't discuss investment here, only the technology.

Brother Qiang is not keeping you in suspense. Let’s get to the answer. Theoretically, it can be cracked, but if the cost of cracking is greater than its actual value, then the effort put into cracking it will no longer have any practical value.

Bitcoin has many technical features, but today we will discuss the security of Bitcoin privacy.

To make it easier for everyone to understand, Brother Qiang wants to make an analogy. If you want to log into your bank card, you need to know the account number and password. Bitcoin also has an account and password, just with different names. The account number is called an address, and the password is called a private key. You can make the address public to receive transfers from others.

The security of the private key depends on two conditions. First, have you leaked it? Second, does the private key have sufficient strength? There are many ways to leak it, for example, taking a screenshot, which could result in your image falling into the hands of hackers. Therefore, the best way to save your private key is to write it down by hand and never connect it to the internet!

Next, let's take a look at the strength of Bitcoin's materials, just like this picture shows. If you count, you will find a pattern; there are a total of 256 digits, but there are only zeros and ones.

If we use coins as a metaphor, the front represents 1 and the back represents 0. If you toss it 256 times in a row, the probability that the result matches the computing power above is actually no different from finding a thin needle in the Pacific Ocean.

At this time, some smart people might say, why not just use a computer instead of doing it manually? Yes, theoretically, as long as the computing speed of the computer is fast enough, it can collide to produce exactly the same thing.

But there is always a but.

The private key of Bitcoin is 2 to the power of 256. Anyone who has gone through middle school should understand that it means 2 multiplied by 2 multiplied by 2, and you have to multiply it 256 times. It may not sound like much, but the final number is actually very large.

How big is it? To make it easier for everyone to understand, let's break down 2 to the power of 256 into 8 times 2 to the power of 32. 2 to the power of 3 to the power of 2 is approximately equal to 400 million. In other words, you need to multiply 40 billion 8 times.

Taking the latest GPU from NVIDIA in 2025 as an example, it can perform 33.52 trillion calculations per second. Therefore, you would need to stack 4,773 GPUs to complete the calculation of 4 billion multiplied by 4 billion in one second. This corresponds to what we just mentioned: multiplying eight 4 billions.

We have only solved the first two 400 million. According to public information, the price of this GPU is 1999 dollars. Therefore, this supercomputer will cost 9.54 million dollars.

Next, let's look at the third fact, you can think of it as owning 4 billion of these supercomputers. According to public information, the world's richest person, Elon Musk, has a net worth of 342 billion dollars. Therefore, you would need 110,000 Musks to raise enough money to afford 4.1 billion supercomputers.

Let's look at the fourth fact, which you can think of as seconds. Let AI calculate it for you, and you'll know that 41 seconds equals 126 years. In other words, Musk wants to crack private medicine, and he must ensure that he can live for at least another 126 years.

There are 4 more 41s behind, and I won't count any further. Because it really has no meaning.

Now you should have a general feeling about the difficulty of cracking. Cracking a Bitcoin private key is a massive project that is both costly and time-consuming. It may be theoretically feasible, but the practical reality is fundamentally different.

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