You have to "cook the books" for something like that to happen. The person described above had to put himself in positions where conditions where lightning would strike. I'm not saying he did it on purpose, but maybe next time he sees a storm cloud over head and begins to smell ozone he should head inside. You could do the same with bitcoin and use poor RNG to generate addresses and you then put yourself in a position where a collision is more likely. For instance using the brainwallet "cat" or "satoshi nakamoto" those are technically collisions but they are due to poor RNG not a fault in the bitcoin protocol.
I`m sure he didnt do it on purpose, no person would want to get struck by lightning. And i`m sure that the probability weights in stupid people mobile phoning when weather comes. After all many people are struck by lighning while phoning, so i`m sure the probability counts that in too
Thus weather you search for being struck by lighning or not, the probabilities are still around that.
This image should at least be posted once in every "but it's possible for someone to create the same address, right?"-thread:
We are not counting until 2^160, we are picking random combinations from that pool, there are odds that you pick satoshis address (with the 1 million bitcoins on it) on the first pick.
Sure the odds are low, but i demonstrated with the example above that its possible, and very probable during the course of our lifetime.
1 person out of 1 billion will be very unlucky and will get its bitcoin stolen, if not more. Because random picking has actually only 2^80 odds, targeted picking has 2^160.
At conception....
I`m not sure if sperm cells are that different between eachother, maybe i would have had a little other tone of my haircolor, but its not that big of a difference.
But we are not talking about probable events that happen many times, so far i only know that there is 1 person that is myself, i dont know of 2 of me being born lol.
But with lightning strikes, there are atleast 3000-4000 strikes happening /year, so that is a repeating phenomenon.
The same with bitcoin addresses, many malicious hackers randomly generating addresses, and 1 lucky idiot will find satoshis 1 million bitcoins, is probable.
I suggest a e-200 probability, why take any chances?
