Quote from: 88mph on September 16, 2023, 09:24:27 PM

Thank you, everyone, for the replies. I appreciate it. As a software developer I consider myself reasonably smart, but discussions like this break my brain Cheesy

A follow-up, if I may: Given what you know about the math behind this: How confident do you feel having your entire Bitcoin wealth in a single wallet? (Assume you have perfect OPSEC and the only "risk" is an accidental or brute-force collision with your wallet address.) Just curious.

FWIW, I understand Grayscale (GBTC) has their Bitcoin split up in separate wallets of 1000 BTC each. (If only I had enough to split into 1000 chunks.)

Thanks again!

More wallets means more OPSEC required for you to do to keep all of them safe. That means more seed phrases to hide, more auditing of wallets required as well as the locations they are stored in, more computers because you can't truly split your holdings on different wallets on the same device, and ultimately more ways to shoot yourself in the foot if any of these devices get phished or stolen <or simply if you forget a seed phrase>.

As you can see, brute-force collision has almost no factor in this consideration because there are only 21 million bitcoins and theoretically they can be spread out in max 21,000,000 * 10^8 = 21 * 10^14 = 210 trillion addresses, a far cry from the total address space of 2^160. It ultimately means that most adreses will never have any coins in them.