Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: total bitcoin address 2^160 or 2^160/2
by
BlackHatCoiner
on 04/10/2021, 14:44:19 UTC
For the input of the ripe-md160 function the publickey (compressed and uncompressed makes no difference) will get hashed with sha256.

So there can be collisions for one address (conclusion) in the range of 2^96, according to the birthday paradox.
Just to mention something significant: It's not the fact that the public key gets hashed with SHA256, which will give a 256-bit number as a result, the reason why there on average 2160 different combinations. It's the range of public keys that is ALSO around 2256. If the range of public keys was not this, but something like [1, 10], there could only be 10 different SHA256 hashes; not ~2256.

2. How many private keys are in the range with the same Compressed address?
You mean how many private keys give the same compressed address? As said, approximately 2256 / 2160 = 296. That's true for uncompressed addresses too.