Brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.

• Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography

I was reminded of this quote, due to the discussions triggered by the Bitcoin private key database troll website about the feasibility of brute-force searching for the private key of a Bitcoin address.

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

• Albert Allen Bartlett

A reddit user made some calculations:

So, if you could use the entire planet as a hard drive, storing 1 byte per atom, using stars as fuel, and cycling through 1 trillion keys per second, you'd need 37 octillion Earths to store it, and 237 billion suns to power the device capable of doing it, all of which would take you 3.6717 octodecillion years.

• PSBlake (reddit)

Bitcoin private key database - directory.io

Perhaps this will refresh your memory.

Nobody thought [Twitter] was a good idea. And I distinctly remember my colleague Evan Williams saying, 'Well, neither is ice cream. Should we ban ice cream and all joy or can we have something that's just fun? What's wrong with that?'

• Biz Stone, co-founder and Creative Director of Twitter (via)

Everything was a little bit more correct, politically, a few years ago...

• Jamie and Reggie experiment with cigarettes
  Small Wonder S02E01, 13 Sep. 1986

Update: See the "Spin Doctor" Hard Drive Speakers play Second Reality

Twenty years after Assembly '93, Future Crew released the source code for Second Reality.

I was 16. I downloaded it from a BBS on a 14.4 modem.

I wasn't a beginner. I was writing TSRs. I wrote routines to render 3D meshes with Gouraud shading. I was doing inline assembly blocks in Turbo Pascal. I understood VGA registers. I could set up Mode 13h, chain to Mode X, write directly to 0xA000.

Then I ran SECOND.EXE.

The real-time 3D. The rotozoomer. The texture-mapped tunnel synced to the beat. The lens distortion. That transition where the music drops and everything snaps into the next effect without a single frame of hesitation.

I knew exactly enough to understand how far ahead this was. It was not just palette tricks. These guys had the entire VGA timing pipeline under control while mixing a multi-track soundtrack in software on the same CPU. Twenty-three effects in sequence with music sync and zero glitches on the same 486.

Update: Added more information and thoughts in 2020, 2024, 2025, 2026.

The Source Code

Twenty years of wondering how they did it. Now I can read it.