The homepage directory.io pretended to publish all private and public keys of the users of the digital payment system bitcoin. The rumors about the braking in into the system have simultaneously impacted the market price of currency. The system in general has proven and was described as invulnerable to any attack possible, which caused a disaster and emergency among the members of the community. Afterwards the terrible news has proven to be a joke that had almost fatal aftermaths.
To state it more understandable we should mention that the possible hackers have placed on directory.io keys that allow gaining access to the electronic wallets that belong to existing users, who already store BTC there, make payments or receive them. Many users who earlier believed that entrance of strangers is excluded have started to get rid of bitcoins and attempted to regain their money.
Several minutes were necessary to drop the price of BTC. After the data provided by the wallet service Blockchain the maximal ever course was set on the 1st December 2013 and was equal to 1224 dollars. The activity of sellers brought the price to drop till 850 dollars as of the 2nd Decembers, 00.20. Still it continued to drop even afterwards.
This situation proofed to be nothing else as a terrible joke. The page published by the hackers does not generate existing keys – it creates any possible – for future wallets, abandoned ones, or such that will never be created. The developer of the page directory.io explains his joke very plainly: “Remember Your ere said that it is impossible to generate a pair, that matches someone’s else? There You have a visual proof that it is possible. Look how many pages there are!”
There are about 9x1074 pages on the website that are generated automatically. Let us compare it with the Global web – the amount is indexed pages of the Internet is further more – about several milliards. Every of the mentioned pages have a massage below – “It took great PC capacities, to generate this database! We accepted payments!”. For every generated private key there is the ID of the wallet. The most links on the wallets are empty or not existing wallets.
Theoretically among the generated key pairs might be someone’s real wallet, but the probability is very low: there are millions of wallets. The search is also unavailable, because first the pairs should be generated and saved in the database. If we assume that the page can be scanned with the velocity of 999 trillions of pages per second the operation will long about 2,86 milliards of years.