Should I Mine or Should I Break: On the Worthiness of Brute-Forcing Cryptocurrency Addresses

Cryptocurrencies are digital assets that can be used as a medium of exchange and are stored in a ledger in the form of a cryptography-secured computer database. Most cryptocurrencies are deployed in decentralized networks such as the blockchain, where they can be transferred from an address to another. However, anyone having access to the private key of an address can fully operate and steal the full balance of such address. Although brute-force attacks consume significant resources in terms of time and power, breaking one of the richest cryptocurrency addresses leads to a huge reward in terms of hard money. Therefore, an attacker may be incentivized to run this attack.In this paper, we run a statistical study of cryptocurrencies distribution over the richest addresses and assess the worthiness of a brute-force attack towards their public key. We consider an attacker investing a certain amount of hard money (i.e., a currency that is made up of or directly backed by a valuable commodity such as gold) to run the attack and propose a statistical characterization of the average gained reward. To further assess the worthiness of a brute-forcing attack, we compare the average reward with that of other probabilistic reward systems, such as mining and scratch cards. Results show that the average reward of the proposed attack is six orders of magnitude lower than that of mining and 10 orders of magnitude lower than that of scratching cards for a given initial investment.