Quote from: MrSolo on Today at 11:06:26 AM

and my point with this topic is that people who say 2^256 and discounting the amount of wallets that are out there with a balance so you're not targeting one wallet but +40mill and growing amount of wallets. maybe oneday it will be billions of wallets.

It still doesn't matter. You are failing to comprehend the sheer size of thr numbers we are talking about here.

2¹⁶⁰ is the collision space for finding a private key which matches to a specific address. This is the equivalent of trying to pick one single specific atom out of all the atoms in the entire world.

Now let's consider your "billions of wallets" situation. Let's use water as an example, and instead of "billions", let's ramp it up to 8 billion billion - enough for every person in the world to have a billion addresses. 8 billion billion molecules of water, divided by Avogadro's constant, multiplied the molar mass of water, gives 0.0002 milliliters of water. That's about 0.5% of the volume of a single drop of water. Let's spread all the molecules in that 1/200th of a single drop of water around and inside the entire planet. How likely is it going to be to find one?

You can ramp this example up by many more orders of magnitude before you approach something that is even remotely within the realms of possibilities.