[Cryptography] Quarter-million dollar bounty for key crack....

[Ray Dillinger]

Okay, anybody out there who has an idea for special hardware that
can break an ECDSA key, or a way to do better than random guessing,
you should be aware that somebody is offering a quarter-million
dollar (at current bitcoin prices) bounty for doing so.

I'm pretty confident that this prize will never be claimed, but
if anybody's got anything that they've been considering out-of-budget
for an attack, it could help.

Details at:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=427753.0

No idea who this guy is, but he's been around that forum for a
while and has a verifiable history of flinging wealth around
(usually in ways that make him more; he's clearly not stupid).

So the bounty is credible.  Although I'm relatively certain
there's no way within the laws of math and physics to claim it,
I could be wrong.

I'm actually more interested in the key he wants cracked.  It
doesn't show up on any casual searches, but could it possibly
be a mathematical transformation of a key that stores large
wealth somewhere in the bitcoin blockchain, such that if someone
cracks *this* key for him, he can use the answer to derive
a *different* key that unlocks a large amount of bitcoin?

				Bear




-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/attachments/20150222/99836d49/attachment.sig>