Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: What are the chances of an address collision? and what happens when it does?
by
molecular
on 31/10/2012, 20:04:37 UTC
I'm not saying collisions anywhere close to likely to occur, but...

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%

This is the chance of finding a collision when generating 1 address.

The chance of a collision occuring "at all" is higher.

Let's assume (worst case) we use bitcoin for 1E3 years and there are 1E10 people populating earth at any point in time who will generate on average 1E3 addresses during their lifetimes.

What are the chances of a collision to occur under these assumptions?