Re: Accidentally created a wallet address that someone else already has?
Read this: http://codinginmysleep.com/stealing-bitcoins-the-hardest-way/
Lets say you build a super ASIC on 12nm (4 generations ahead of current tech) process that could create, validate, and steal one trillion key pairs per second (1 TK/s). That would be about 50,000x more powerful than faster GPUs today. Lets also say you built a thousand of them and ran them continually with no downtime 24/7/365. In 1 year you could brute force 3*10^28 possible addresses.
If there are 1 quadrillion funded addresses you would still have a ~1% chance of colliding with a random funded address in the next 1,000 years.
Comparatively speaking, your odds of being struck by lightning are about 1 in 280,000, so youre about 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to find an address within the first year. Since thats also a big number, the odds are equivalent to being struck by lightning about 4.6 times in your lifetime
Lets say you build a super ASIC on 12nm (4 generations ahead of current tech) process that could create, validate, and steal one trillion key pairs per second (1 TK/s). That would be about 50,000x more powerful than faster GPUs today. Lets also say you built a thousand of them and ran them continually with no downtime 24/7/365. In 1 year you could brute force 3*10^28 possible addresses.
If there are 1 quadrillion funded addresses you would still have a ~1% chance of colliding with a random funded address in the next 1,000 years.
Comparatively speaking, your odds of being struck by lightning are about 1 in 280,000, so youre about 500,000,000,000,000,000,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to find an address within the first year. Since thats also a big number, the odds are equivalent to being struck by lightning about 4.6 times in your lifetime
Man struck by lightning 7 times.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/inside-the-life-of-the-man-known-as-the-spark-ranger/2013/08/15/947cf2d8-ea40-11e2-8f22-de4bd2a2bd39_story.html
The odds of becoming a lightning victim in the U.S. in any one year is 1 in 700,000
The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1 in 3,000
http://news.nationalgeographic.co.in/news/2004/06/0623_040623_lightningfacts.html
