The Private Key to Satoshi Nakamoto's $8 Billion Bitcoin Fortune is on This Site-And So is Yours

It's no secret that a cryptocurrency wallet can be accessed by a private key-a string of letters and numbers that, if revealed, allows all those who hold it access to the cryptocurrency held within.

Private keys can be lost in many ways-phishing hacks, malware, by accident or even by brute force-and given enough time, it's possible to generate a private key that will unlock a crypto wallet that contains a fortune.

The concept of brute-forcing cryptocurrency wallets is not new.

Given a completely random private key, it's possible to create a corresponding public key to check the balance of the wallet in question to determine whether it contains any cryptocurrency.

The idea of miraculously stumbling across a Bitcoin wallet's private key- say, any of the wallets on the Bitcoin rich list-is attractive, potentially netting lucky punters billions instantly.

Even the world's fastest supercomputer-the IBM-built Summit, which consists of 37,000 processors performing 200 quadrillion calculations per second-would take an eternity to crack the private key to a specific cryptocurrency address using 256-bit encryption.

The extremely low chance of finding a winning pair via this method hasn't deterred enterprising developers trying their luck.

The Large Bitcoin Collider is a controversial community-driven distributed effort to find at least one collision of private Bitcoin keys, operating in a similar manner to mining pools.

To date, the Large Bitcoin Collider has succeeded in capturing private keys that yield only minimal BTC but has found a number of so-called "Puzzle transactions," mysterious artifacts within the Bitcoin blockchain that defy explanation.

Larger than the estimated total number of atoms that compose the visible universe, 115 quattuorvigintillion is obviously a very large number.