Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Merits 5 from 4 users
Re: Are all BTC addresses really unique?
by
DannyHamilton
on 07/11/2019, 22:12:14 UTC
⭐ Merited by HCP (2) ,AdolfinWolf (1) ,MrFreeDragon (1) ,ETFbitcoin (1)
But, most pools use ASICS only which perform SHA-256 only- so- (someone correct me if i'm wrong here.)- it would be wrong to compare the "computing"/hash power of a pool to generating addresses.

You are correct.

The ASICs used by mining pools are not capable of generating bitcoin addresses.

However, lets use our imagination and create a world where some very wealthy person decides to invest all of their wealth into creating special ASICs that are capable of generating Bitcoin addresses.

Lets imagine that they are able to generate addresses at the same rate that the current bitcoin network is capable of generating hashes.  In other words, lets imagine that they can generate 115,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses per second.

There are 2160 different bitcoin addresses of the type that start with a 1 (legacy, P2PKH).

(2160 addresses) / (115 X 1018 addresses per second) = 1.27 X 1028 seconds.

So, it would take about 1,270,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 seconds to generate all possible addresses (assuming you never generated the same address twice).

The estimated time that the universe has existed since the "Big Bang" is about 13.772 Billion Years.

(13,772,000,000 years) X (31,557,600 seconds per year) = 434,611,267,200,000,000 seconds since the beginning of the universe.

So, the universe has existed for approximately 4.35 X 1017 seconds.

This means that if you used all that imaginary address generating power and started generating addresses at the moment that the Big Bang happened...

By now, you would have generated approximately:
(4.35X1017 seconds in the universe) / (1.27 X 1028 seconds to generate ALL addresses) = 0.00000343% of all possible addresses.

To generate all the possible addresses (assuming you never generated the same address twice), it would require you to continue generating addresses for another:
(1.27 X 1028 seconds to generate ALL addresses) / (4.35 X 1017 seconds in the universe) = 29,195,402,299 entire universes worth of time.