Quote from: bill gator on June 11, 2018, 07:09:22 PM

Then I misunderstand the Powerball, because I'm talking about matching the numbers randomly pulled. Your chances of matching random numbers would be unaffected by the random numbers that others have chosen. Their "guesses" do not make your guess any more or less likely to be correct. Again, I might not understand how lotteries work I guess, but this is how I understand it. How are the chances equal to the tickets in a lottery of random numbers? More tickets makes it more likely that someone wins, but it wouldn't make your chances vary.

I clearly don't live in a Powerball country, I was assuming it uses tickets.
Anyway, the same applies: the chance that you win is small, but the chance that someone wins is quite large (I don't know the details of the lottery).
For the sake of argument, let's say the chance that someone wins is 10%.
For Bitcoin, even if a billion people search for collissions, the chance that someone finds one is stil 0.00000000......0001%.
That's what makes it so unlikely to ever find one.
In the Powerball lottery, a large part of the search space is covered. In Bitcoin, only a very small fraction is covered.

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You're over exaggerating, unless we're operating on the assumption that you can win with a stolen ticket, or something? I do see your point though.

I was thinking about finding a ticket. I think it's a safe assumption that some tickets are lost, out of millions of tickets. Let's put the chance of finding a ticket at 1 in a million, that still makes it billions times more likely to win with that ticket than finding a collision.

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Apparently, because I do not know the difference. I've thought on this for hours and I cannot figure out the riddle. Help me understand theoretical chance Vs. real chance, genuinely, I am interested.

I may have made up the difference for the sake of argument. Real chance: it won't happen. Theoretical: it might happen. But the chance is so low that you can safely say it won't happen anyway (I read someone else explain this better once).

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What are the odds of me randomly generating your phone number, credit card and catching you at a good time for a phone call? Wink

1 in 10^11 if you don't know my country
1 in 10^16 for my creditcard
About 100% for calling at the right time.

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collision = randomly generating a previously randomly generated Private Key, right?

No, you can never prove you found them independently. A collision means having two private keys that both produce the same address.