When you see a deer you're supposed to slam the brakes. Reduce speed as much as possible. After that, if a
collision
is inevitable. You have to let go of the brakes. If you keep the brakes on the front of the car slopes down. And the deer will go...
1. -> would be easy to do. Just look at a block explorer :) 2. -> There isn't a breach (collisions) for the SHA256 Algorithm yet.
So as long as you can't produce the same hash for different input (a
collision
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_attack & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5) it would take hundreds of years (or even thousands) to land a match with brute force.
The SHA256 has 2^256 (1.1579209e+77) different combinations so even if you would have 1 million hashes per second it would take 1.1579209e+71 seconds (= 1.3401862e+66 days -> divided by 365 days per year it is still 3.6717431e+63 years) to calculate all combinations.
If you up the hash rate to one billion per second (10^9) you merely change the years: 3.6717431e+60.
bitcoin
currently has a total hash rate (https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate) of 175076 million. Using that as input for our calculation it would take 2.0972281e+58 years to calculate all hashes in SHA256 :)
So as long nobody is able to find an error inside the algorithm (collision attack) you can't brute force address keys because it would take way more power than
bitcoin
is currently consuming. And if you got similar large power rates as
bitcoin
has, a 51% attack (https://www.coindesk.com/learn/what-is-a-51-attack/) would be "way easier" to perform.
But again, you would need as much power as the whole bitcoin network currently has, and a little bit more.
