Out of curiosity, do you have any idea the longest minimal firstbit today?
Assuming you don't need anything meaningful, I'd say it's at 1+4 or even 1+3 if you're lucky.
I was thinking the other way around. Such as if there were both 123456789a and 123456789b, then the longest firsbits might be 1+9.
Even better, has anyone graphed the shortest/average/longest as a function of blocks (time) with predictions into the future?
Predicting it would be hard since it depends on the rate of transactions.
Yes, and that would be a fine independent variable, various min, max, averages per transaction. I could calculate it I had a dump of all addresses per block. Can the blk*.dat tell me that? I don't want to DoS blockexplorer with wget/curl requests.