Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: OG Bitcoin Wallet Addresses Suddenly Active - Are they being hacked?
by
aoluain
on 16/05/2023, 06:22:38 UTC
You are kidding right.

This has been long debated in the forum and the odds are so low as to be ridiculous.

I mean theres tons of addresses out there so its like how could you not hit one
Because there are this many possible valid 12 word seeds:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456

And there only approximately 30 million bitcoin addresses with balance on them. Divide those two numbers and you get a roughly 1 in 11 million trillion trillion chance of finding a collision. (Now, this is not quite accurate since any seed can generate potentially billions of addresses, but you get the idea.)

If we were talking about 24-word combinations, they are exponentially much smaller.

1 in 11 million, trillion, trillion chance . . . reminds me of the scene from the movie
Dumb and Dumber...

https://youtu.be/nFTRwD85AQ4