Quote from: XonX on July 06, 2011, 08:27:02 PM

Quote from: Rob P. on July 06, 2011, 07:48:41 PM

1) You cannot destroy Bitcoins, you can only lose them (and they CAN be found, albeit with difficulty)

Uhh... Could you please give some info about finding lost bitcoins?

Sure. Whenever your bitcoin client creates a new address, it randomly creates a public/private keypair of one of the 2^160 possible addresses.
If (and it's a HUGE if, with a VERY low probability, but it's not ZERO) you create a public/private keypair that someone else has already created, you'll have access to the coins in that address in the block chain.

Elsewhere in the forum someone was working on a program that would generate approximately 80,000 bitcoin addresses per second.

At that rate you can create 80,000 * 31536000 (seconds/year) = 2,522,880,000,000 (2.5 Trillion) addresses a year.
However, you'd have to run that for 5.7929891129617856×10^35 years, to exhaust all of the address space.

And of course, you'd have to have a client that could handle that many addresses, which I doubt the default client can do. So, you'd have to come up with a way to check them all in the block chain to see if they are valid, which would slow down your rate.

It's a big number. So, the odds of two people colliding with the same address are astronomically tiny.

You'd be better off using vanity ID creation code to try to create a specific address, at least then if/when you found it, you'd know it.