Recovering Lost Bitcoins: FPGA vs GPU Performance Comparison

[Stonestreecty]

TL;DR Summary

I have a question regarding FPGA performance vs GPU (I've reviewed this). I’m trying to recover lost bitcoins that I mined in the early days. Do you think an FPGA like this could do this in a reasonable time?

Hello all,
I have a question regarding FPGA performance vs GPU (I've reviewed it before). I’m trying to recover lost bitcoins that I mined in the early days. I knew it was important to keep the private key but in the end I somehow managed to lose my private key but I still have 24 out of 32 bytes of my private key, found on half a piece of paper when I printed that private key back in 2012.

So I have 24 bytes out of the total 32 bytes of my private key. I can only recover this by brute forcing. But I’m not familiar with FPGA and I’m totally unsure how fast they would be able to do these calculations.

The required calculations would be incrementing a 256 bit number (starting at the lower boundary of the 24 bytes out of the 32 I have), doing the elliptic curve calculation in order to get a public key and then ripemd160(sha256(publicKey)) and compare the resulting hash160 with my address hash160. If they are equal I found my private key and I can recover my bitcoins.

Do you think an FPGA like this could do this in a reasonable time? I don't mind if it takes a year for example but there is no point in doing this if it takes > 100 years... I’m trying to figure out if it’s worth going with an FPGA for this in order to recover +- 110 BTC. Maybe I need too many FPGA’s and it might not be worth it… Or do you think high end GPU’s like an nvidia 1080TI will be better suited for the job?

If you think an FPGA can certainly be used for this. What kind of FPGA am I looking at, how much do they cost and how many would I need?

Best regards

 

[Tom.G]

Having looked into both in the past but with no direct experience with either, my opinion is that learning, designing, and implementing an FPGA solution that works will take a substantial portion (all?) of your one year time frame.

Go with the GPU; they already have the pipelining, etc. that you would need to implement in an FPGA.

Good Luck!

 

[sysprog]

@Stonestreecty, it's infeasible for you to test $256^8$ possibilities for being your lost member of the blockchain. To test all of them, e.g. at the rate of 1 gigabit of possibilities/sec, it would take $256^8 / 1,000,000,000[poss/sec] / 60[sec/min] /1440[min/day]/365.25[day/yr]$ ≈ 584.54 years, and on average, it would take about 50% of that time to find your quarry.