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Re: How many possibly bitcoin addresses are there exactly? And how long does it...
by
Peter R
on 12/06/2014, 21:05:32 UTC
More than atoms in the universe
That is not correct, not even close.
The estimated number of atoms in the observable universe (10^80) is 71 million trillion trillion times greater than 2^160.

Interestingly, 10^80 ~= 2^266.  So if ECDSA public keys were just hashed by SHA256 (and not hashed again with RIPEMD-160 to shorten the address string) then the total number of possible addresses would be comparable to the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe.