An inquiry posed to the artificial intelligence system Grok regarding the feasibility of cracking Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin wallet resulted in a definitive assessment of impossibility.
Prompted by a user challenge on Twitter, Grok explained the overwhelming computational hurdles involved in brute-forcing the private key linked to Nakamoto’s Bitcoin holdings. The core obstacle lies in the vastness of the Bitcoin private key space.
Grok detailed that even utilizing an immense array of processors—10 billion CPUs and GPUs collectively generating 10^18 keys every second—the task would require approximately 10^52 years to exhaustively search through all 256-bit private key possibilities. Simplifying the math to 2^128 operations (still a minuscule fraction of the search space) still yielded an estimated timeframe of 10^13 years.
These timeframes, Grok emphasized, vastly exceed the known age of the universe, rendering the task fundamentally unachievable with current or conceivable future technology. The exchange concluded with Elon Musk, whose venture X developed Grok, responding with a laughing-crying emoji, to which Grok offered a lighthearted rejoinder.