Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Is it possible for two private keys/clients to generate identical BTC address ?
by
ribuck
on 19/02/2011, 20:36:41 UTC
Bear in mind, we are not looking for a single address among the clouds here.  We are looking for -any- address containing BTC.

Suppose each of the 7 billion people in the world has 1000 unspent addresses. On average you would need to try more than 1035 addresses to find each spendable one. Suppose you can check a million addresses per second, this is going to take you more than 1021 years.

If everyone in the world is trying to crack this at the same time, it will still take around 1012 years. And when someone finally cracks it, after paying the electricity bill for 1012 years, they might be disappointed to find that the key unlocks just 0.05 BTC from the Bitcoin Faucet. Even if it's ten million bitcoins, it's not going to pay the electricity bill for 7 billion computers running for a trillion years.