Re: NEM Official Thread - Beta is here/Phase 2 Redemption begins[Updates&Discussion]
Devs
Is there any, even very very small possibility, that some two people generate the same address and private key using BETA? Is there some checking to not generate the same address?
Is there any, even very very small possibility, that some two people generate the same address and private key using BETA? Is there some checking to not generate the same address?
It could happen on the same day that you get struck by lightning, win the lottery, get hit by a neutrino, and have your body ripped apart encountering dark matter.
I thought we get hit by neutrinos constantly it's just that noone notices ? They even had a hard time building a detector for those little buggers.
Yeah you're right. I think about 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body each second, they just interact very very weakly with matter... As analogies go, that one failed catastrophically
Very quickly doing the maths: each private key is 66 characters long, each entry can be 1 of 36 characters. The total possible number of private keys is therefore 3666 which is a staggeringly huge number; 5.2 x 10102. The likelihood of someone generating the same private key as you is vanishingly small - small enough to treat as 0.
Good math, but your assumptions are not quite correct. It's actually a 64 digit hexadecimal number, so 256-bit, just like most BTC private keys. BloodyRookie above has it right; it's a significantly more likely, but still vanishingly small chance.
Base-36 wouldn't really be used anywhere that I know of. BTC WIF uses Base-58 for example, but "raw" private keys would typically be represented as hexadecimal as here.