Bitcoin Core dev: It will take almost infinity years to "crack" a BTC address with a GPU

Image from the user "MasterChangz," indicating he is testing 600 million private keys each second with a graphics card to try and hack a Bitcoin wallet.

In a tweet that went crypto-viral, the pseudonymous Bitcoin trader wrote that assuming a 1,000 percent improvement in computational speed every two years, there will soon be technologies that can crack BTC wallets - whether there are zero, two and a half, or ten thousand coins in the wallet - in a reasonable amount of time.

"Every 2 years the speed increases ~10x with hardware & technological upgrades. Bitcoin's days are numbered, give it 5 years, faster script, faster hardware & a hashing pool," he wrote.

According to a Bitcoin Core developer, there is no reason to be concerned - at least not at the moment.

One of the beauties of Bitcoin is that if you are the only one that knows a private key, you are the only one with access to the BTC attached to that key.

That's to say, you or your computer could enter in a jumble of alphanumeric characters into a Bitcoin wallet and hope that it yields some addresses with coins on them.

Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin Core developer, remarked that at 600 MK/s - computational power that most mid-high grade graphics cards have today -it will take "On average 38593493520073954175290747912192 years to crack an older Bitcoin address."

Some were quick to say that Bitcoin is on its way out, while others expected the asset to crash lower as news of this quantum supremacy spread. But these fears - like the ones mentioned in the first portion of this article - were also overblown.

Jack Matier, a team member of the Quantum Resistant Ledger, in 2019 extrapolated the growth of the computational power of quantum computers over the four years.

Yes, 2.3 to 5.3 years away sounds close, but as it stands, there is no computer that has fixed the "Lingering issue of error-correction" and the other issue of "Scaling," which would make any attempt at hacking a BTC or altcoin address extremely hard.