Quote from: Nyhm on December 25, 2012, 08:44:31 PM

Quote from: TheButterZone on December 25, 2012, 07:52:56 PM

Quote from: Luke-Jr on December 25, 2012, 12:42:50 PM

Quote from: wachtwoord on December 25, 2012, 11:30:30 AM

BTW: When people say chances of collision is low they don't mean 'low' as people use the word in normal everyday life. In reality the chances are infinitely small. The chance of Sol going supernova in the next microsecond is considerably larger then the chance of a collision ever occurring.

For a properly generated address, right. But this one came from a closed source vanity address generator of dubious design.

The generator I used: http://nyhm.net/bitcoin/vanity/
The topic about the generator: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=76038.0

Note my post above and at the vanity generator topic.

One thing I want to make sure I understand: BTC are being sent to your public vanity address, not taken from it, yes? This is, of course, very important. It's a wild leap to go from receiving BTC at an address to considering the possibility of a collision. If BTC is ever taken from the address without your direct intervention, then that's another thing. (Even in that case, it's much more likely your private key was compromised in some way, rather than a collision.)

So, I'm keen to follow this very interesting situation, and will assist in any way possible. Here's what folks can do (as will I): Run the vanity generator with the same first bits in question (or the whole thing for that matter). If anyone hits upon the target address, let us know (and prove it). In fact, if you can ever produce any duplicate address, it would be remarkable, and the research would certainly be valuable for the Bitcoin/bitcoinj community (the generator uses the bitcoinj library to produce addresses).

(PS I actually have some updates in the works for this utility, but I'll keep the v0.4 version up there for now. Note the clear warnings on the page.)

EDIT: There's an (undocumented) command-line switch for non-gui searching. Try this: java -jar VanityAddress-v0.4.jar TBZ --case-sensitive

Yep, thanks.

519.704 total was sent to it, and nothing was taken. Since receiving that amount (and 0.1337 BTC inbetween that I won in a "first person to post your address gets free BTC" contest), I split off the 519.704 (minus 1 satoshi) amount to another key, and my own BTC to another key. This way, 1) If someone does have the same private key for 1TBZjmXho6mdGhoESaMV2svtqJXYtWfEp, they can't spend my BTC 2) If they are paying attention to their balances, it will appear their BTC has been stolen, so hopefully they will find this topic 3) Hopefully this will prevent confusion in other ways.