Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Getting my head round it.
by
doobadoo
on 21/04/2013, 02:58:33 UTC
in laymans terms, what he is saying is that if you built the most energy efficient computer possible, you could not generate all the possible public keys that the ECDSA curve has to offer, using all the energy of the sun.

Now the number of addresses is a somewhat smaller number, so there are multiple possible pubkeys for each address. But pay that no mind as there are still a poopload of available addresses.  58^33 to be exact.  How big is that number?

170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

I may have hit 1 too many/few zeros...

Your current computer could probably only generate a few thousand of those key pairs a second.

All the computers on earth, if running just this generation would probably fail to get there before the proton decays.  And when the proton decays, we're all fucked, regardless of your bitcoin balance.