No, the beach isn't more or less uniform than some other beach, or the island that contains it, or the planet that holds the island. Maybe a dog pissed over the sand you're looking at, it doesn't say anything about the whole picture. That is the whole point: randomness. If you flip a coin 2 quadrillion times, it won't get to exactly 1 quadrillion heads and 1 quadrillion tails, even after quadrillions of repeats. If it does end up like that more times than expected, it doesn't make it a fair coin, it makes it a rigged coin (since you can predict the results in your favor).

Even if H160 is rigged (the beach is "uniform", or prefixes are spread out predictably in other words), it would only mean you can rig the input (the SHA256), but then you have another problem: how to find the public key (if one even exists) that hashes to that particular SHA256. And assuming you do find it, you'll then need to find the corresponding private key, which is itself a 2**124 bits problem anyway.

No, the beach isn't more or less uniform than some other beach, or the island that contains it, or the planet that holds the island. Maybe a dog pissed over the sand you're looking at, it doesn't say anything about the whole picture. That is the whole point: randomness. If you flip a coin 2 quadrillion times, it won't get to exactly 1 quadrillion heads and 1 quadrillion tails, even after quadrillions of repeats. If it does end up like that more times than expected, it doesn't make it a fair coin, it makes it a rigged coin (since you can predict the results in your favor).

Even if H160 is rigged (the beach is "uniform", or prefixes are spread out predictably in other words), it would only mean you can rig the input (the SHA256), but then you have another problem: how to find the public key (if one even exists) that hashes to that particular SHA256. And assuming you do find it, you'll then need to find the corresponding private key, which is itself a 2**124 bits problem anyway.

No, the beach isn't more or less uniform than some other beach, or the island that contains it, or the planet that holds the island. Maybe a dog pissed over the sand you're looking at, it doesn't say anything about the whole picture. That is the whole point: randomness. If you flip a coin 2 quadrillion times, it won't get to exactly 1 quadrillion heads and 1 quadrillion tails, even after quadrillions of repeats. If it does end up like that more times than expected, it doesn't make it a fair coin, it makes it a rigged coin (since you can predict the results in your favor).

Even if H160 is rigged (the beach is "uniform", or prefixes are spread out predictably in other words), it would only mean you can rig the input (the SHA256), but then you have another problem: how to find the public key (if one even exists) that hashes to that particular SHA256. And assuming you do find it, you'll then need to find the corresponding private key, which is itself a 2**124 bits problem anyway.