Guessable Private Keys: How To Make A Million in Cryptocurrency

DIO: 10.13140/RG.2.2.19142.93764 ResearchGate link: here.

In Ethereum, we use ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) to create a public key and a private key. The private key is kept secure, and then the public key is used to derive the Ethereum address. When we sign for a transaction, we use our private key, and to create a signature, and which is automatically checked against our Ethereum address. A transfer then appears as a transaction between two Ethereum addresses, and with a transaction value (as defined in Ether):

In creating the keys (for our wallet) we first generate a 256-bit private key, and then the public key is a point on the secp256k1 ECDSA curve (x,y point) [here]. This key is then hashed using Keccak-256 (aka SHA-3), and the lower 160 bits becomes the public Ethereum address [here]:

The private key should be completely random, and there are 2²⁵⁶ different keys that can be generated, so the chance of us matching a private key to a public key…