Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: How are addresses guaranteed to be unique?
by
Stephen Gornick
on 27/09/2012, 00:41:32 UTC
I am aware that the chance of 2 addresses being identical are remote,


Here's another thread where that question was asked:


Given your example of 1 billion users at 10 addresses each:

There are 2^160 or about 1,460,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible addresses
In your scenario, 1,000,000,000 people are using 10 addresses each for a total of 10,000,000,000 possible addresses
10,000,000,000 / 2^160 should yield the probability of a collision occurring
10,000,000,000 / 2^160 = 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000684

So the chances of a collision occurring in your scenario are approximately 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000684%

See why we don't consider collisions an issue?