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Board Beginners & Help
Re: Bitcoin address exhaustion
by
nmat
on 09/07/2011, 05:13:34 UTC
You are correct, this is a theoretical attack.

Ignoring the probability or computational power behind this attack, lets assume it could be done.

Given that it could be done, if you could generate an address which collided with someone else's address you could spend any Bitcoin they had received at that address.

However, considering the address space involved here, the practicality of finding a collision is astronomical. You could spend the rest of your life generating wallet IDs on as many computers as you could find, and you'd almost 99.999% be guaranteed to never find a single collision.


So, the algorithm for generating wallet id's is that much heavier than the one for mining? People have lot of computing power over here...

As far as I understand, new bitcoin addresses everyday for each new transaction so that must really increase the chance of performing this attack successfully.