Ninjastic
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Is it possible to generate every address from one seed
by
bitmover
on 17/10/2019, 10:53:11 UTC
Quote from: Royse777 on October 16, 2019, 08:44:23 PM
Quote from: apoorvlathey on October 16, 2019, 08:31:28 PM
I would like to know is there a limit to how many bitcoin public keys be generated using one seed phrase. Is it unlimited?
It is unlimited

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If it's not limited then this would mean that wallets with different seeds would cause a clash of their addresses. Am I right?
You really gave a good point however I think there must have an explanation. I will wait for others answer.

As pooya said it is limited to 2^256 (in practical terms only 255)

However this is a very big number.

Every seed can create billions of addresses in each derivation path. That means billions of addresses in change addresses, in legacy, segwit, native segwit, etc etc

A collision , which is what you are talking about is impossible in practical terms. Billions of addresses randomly generated is hard for our minds to understand.


From antonopoulos mastering bitcoin:

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https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/blob/develop/ch05.asciidoc#navigating-the-hd-wallet-tree-structure

The HD wallet tree structure offers tremendous flexibility. Each parent extended key can have 4 billion children: 2 billion normal children and 2 billion hardened children. Each of those children can have another 4 billion children, and so on. The tree can be as deep as you want, with an infinite number of generations.