Quote from: makomk on July 05, 2011, 09:10:55 PM

Quote from: joepie91 on July 05, 2011, 06:30:44 PM

Now what if someone made a botnet generate addresses all the time, 24/7, and would import those addresses into a wallet.dat to try and see if someone else already generated the address, and has funds 'assigned' to it - essentially trying to find collisions? Wouldn't this be an extremely efficient way to generate addresses until an address was found that held funds, to then steal the funds on that address by transfering them elsewhere?

Not really. Let's try some really ridiculous figures. Suppose that everyone in the world had, on average, 1 million bitcoin addresses with money in. Further suppose that you control a billion computers, each of which can try a billion possible addresses a second. If my calculations are correct, you'd still only find an address every 6.6 million years on average.

Edit: Or another way of looking at it: if you had a billion computers testing a billion addresses per second, on average you'd expect to earn one satoshi every 22 million years.

And given the non-inflationary aspect of Bitcoin, that satoshi would probably get you a cup of coffee.