Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin puzzle transaction ~32 BTC prize to who solves it
by
kTimesG
on 17/05/2024, 22:24:39 UTC
So theoretically we have base58 what means we can have 58 letter and number to choose, means the probability of each letter is 1/58, so 1.7241379%
Not really, you started off from a wrong premise.

RIPEMD: 160 bits. 2**160 choices.

2**160 does not divide by 58 so your probability doesn't take into account the bias for the last remainder (only 52 choices out of 58, hence fewer z w x... was this your secret information to keep for yourself lol?), and neither the implicit "1" characters found at the beginning, when the address is shorter than the maximum length (explaining fewer "1"s). Those leading zeros are actually the character "1" in base58. The leading "1" in the address is discardable since it's just a hint that the first byte of the number is 0, which is always true.

Maybe run the stats on the base2 160 bits instead? base58 strings don't map 1:1 with any bitstring, since there is no power of 2 to divide 58, so their space lengths don't fill each other exactly, e.g. I can give you base58 "addresses" with a length identical to a correct one, but that will require more than 160 bits.