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.
The main difference is what we're looking for.
What you are talking about is looking for a needle in a hay stack, literally. You are looking for 1 (even if you say *all* the address, computationally it's still N) thing in a HUGE address space.
However, when we mine we're not looking for a hash collision. We're simply looking for a hash that happens to be numerically equally to or lower than some "arbitrary" other number.
Put in the form of an analogy, if I asked you to "find me someone who was born on March 3rd, 1957" you would have a much hard time at doing than as opposed to if I had asked you to "find me someone born
after March 3rd, 1957".