Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: Are all BTC addresses really unique?
by
Klarks_C
on 08/11/2019, 13:42:18 UTC
(give or take a couple orders of magnitude)
I'd say give a few dozen orders of magnitude. Tongue

Assuming the human race has spread across multiple planets in the next 10 billion years, lets give a generous population estimate of 1 trillion individuals. Even if every single one of those 1 trillion people generates 100 new bitcoin private keys every day (why anyone would need that many I don't know) for 10 billion years, we are still only talking about (1 trillion * 100 * 10 billion * 365) = 3.65*1026 keys.

For OP, even in my hypothetical scenario above, we would still only have generated approximately 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003% of all possible private keys. If we continued to use bitcoin for a trillion trillion trillion years, then we might have to start worrying about collisions, but given that all the stars in the universe will die in only 100 trillion years, we will probably have more pressing issues to deal with.

But there are chances you may get your seeds or phrases randomly guessed by someone and a person who is intentionally doing it, gets lucky some day.
Only if you are silly enough to pick your own seed phrase or use a brainwallet. If you use a proper randomly generated seed phrase, the chances of someone guessing it are essentially the same as the chances of someone generating the same seed as you, as has been outlined above, i.e. never going to happen.
Ok,
Now using the computation power used by a mining pool, what's the time needed to generate all the possible addresses ??
infinite, well not really.

Depending on the source you use, you can calculate the time it would take to generate all possible adresses.
Some more info can be found here-> https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2847/how-long-would-it-take-a-large-computer-to-crack-a-private-key

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.

Thank you,

but, about this, when it takes 3 hours to compute for "1Bitcoi" prefix, 3 hours is sufficient to generate billions addresses if you see what I mean