Quote from: shorena on November 24, 2015, 01:07:49 PM

Quote from: Hugroll on November 24, 2015, 12:55:58 PM

Quote from: DannyHamilton on November 24, 2015, 12:26:00 PM

Quote from: Sir_lagsalot on November 24, 2015, 11:38:29 AM

Assuming I was lucky enough to mine the exact same address, could I get the privkey?

Yes, if you got the exact same address, then you would have one of the 7.9 X 10²⁸ (on average) working private keys for that address.

wait im not quite sure i understand, are you saying that every bitcoin address has more than 1 private key associated with it? I've always thought it was 1private key that links to 1 address

That is correct. There are 2²⁵⁶ private keys with 2²⁵⁶ public keys. The public key is hashed with ripemd160(sha256(pubkey)). Ripemd160 is limited to 2¹⁶⁰ possible solutions thus[1] there are 2¹⁶⁰ possible addresses with 2²⁵⁶ private keys or 2²⁵⁶/2¹⁶⁰ = 2⁹⁶ private keys per address. 2⁹⁶ ~7.9*10²⁸

[1] under some minor assumptions like even distribution

Basically you have a better chance of winning the lottery AND being hit by lightning than guessing the correct private key for a given address. As pointed about in a prior post, the math can change drastically if a faulty RNG was used.