OONA 13 · TIMECLOCK

Searching Infinity

Believe it or not: a bitcoin purse holds a fortune that nobody in the universe can open. It is a burn address, and its key was never written down. Inside the pylon, the "timekeeper" guesses that key ten times a second. It could unlock it right now. Enter the pylon, if you dare.

turn the key on the face
— — —
Keys drawn from infinity
heartbeat10/secbest so far0 of 160 bitsyour tab0/sec
jackpot
$ —
Fetching live balance…
Locked in 1111111111111111111114oLvT2
A bitcoin address with no known key
join the search

Your tab can draw keys too. It costs nothing but a little of your CPU, and it changes the odds by exactly as much as the server does — which is to say, not at all. But every tick is a ticket.

Terms ↗

Or guess one yourself

Type anything — a word, a phrase, a passphrase, a number. We hash it into a 32-byte private key, derive the bitcoin address, and show you where you landed. Every guess is independent.

How long is "forever," exactly?

If you'd been guessing one key per second since the big bang, you'd have made about 4.4 × 10¹⁷ attempts — roughly 1 part in 3.3 × 10³⁰ of the search space.Universe age ≈ 13.8 × 10⁹ years
Why not faster? This clock ticks ten times a second. Make it a billion times faster — ten billion a second, every second since the big bang — and you move from 1 part in 3 × 10²⁹ of the search space to 1 part in 3 × 10²⁰. Still nothing. That is the whole gag, and a tick you can actually watch delivers it better than a blur.10/sec vs 10¹⁰/sec, over 13.8 × 10⁹ years
If every grain of sand on Earth had been guessing one key per second since the big bang, together they'd have covered about 1 in 447 billion of the keys.~7.5 × 10¹⁸ grains
A stack of every possible key, 1 mm per row, would reach across the observable universe 1.7 quintillion times.Diameter ≈ 93 billion light-years
For every possible private key, the Earth contains about 91 atoms. Finding the right one is like picking out one specific atom from roughly 1.1% of the planet.~1.33 × 10⁵⁰ atoms in Earth
And yet — every tick is independent. The trillionth guess has exactly the same odds as the first. The math is flat. The universe owes you no average.Someone is always taking that bet.

How this works

Every bitcoin address is the public face of a private key — a random 256-bit number that no one can predict, including the address that originally generated it. There are about 2160 distinct addresses, and we're searching for the one private key whose public-key hash is exactly twenty zero bytes — a recognizable destination, but one with no shortcut to its key.

So we just guess. Each tick of the clock draws a fresh random 32-byte number, derives its secp256k1 public key, and hashes it with RIPEMD-160(SHA-256(pub)). If the result is twenty zeros, the clock chimes. It almost certainly won't.

The server keeps a slow heartbeat going around the clock; your tab, if you boost it, contributes additional throughput at no cost to anyone but your CPU. On average, neither helps. But the average isn't the bet. Every tick is independent — the trillionth guess has exactly the same odds as the first, and the universe owes you no average. Someone, somewhere, is always taking that bet. It might be you. It might be now.

OONA 13 · TIMECLOCK · Terms