Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: Bitcoin - the first cryptographic commodity, NOT currency
by
Confucius
on 23/06/2011, 03:01:06 UTC
There's 26 characters in the alphabet, so that gives us 52 characters upper + lower case. Then add in 0-9 which totals 62 characters for any place in the address. The address is 34 characters long. Thus, we have 62 possibilities on 34 places, or 62^34 different possibilities of addresses (8.7*10^60). In other words, they aren't going to run out, and the chances of having two identical addresses are practically 0, even if there are billions of billions (10^18) of addresses in the wild which will take practically infinity to create (even at 1 billion addresses per second, it would take 30 years).

The workaround is the currently accepted method of making sure that the sender is the right person, and from a technical standpoint it will work for as long as BTC is around.

Thank you for clarifying this. I am confident that amount of addresses is a comfortable number.
I guess that means man-in-the-middle transactions can be done this way. So my first point of adding layers to the technology is valid