Quote from: 1000000 on July 04, 2014, 08:31:49 AM

http://i.imgur.com/CzyO1yv.jpg

This image is misleading. You don't need to guess the true 256-bit private key that corresponds with the actual wallet. It is sufficient to compute any 256-bit private key whose public key hashes to the 160-bit RIPEMD hash present in the output script. Which is still infeasible, but a 2^160 address space is a completely different ballpark from a 2^256 one.

But before anyone starts worrying about that, if anyone had that kind of hashing power, at the current difficulty it is about 28 decimal orders of magnitude easier to calculate a block for the blockchain than to brute force a single 160-bit hash. In other words, no single address will ever be worth it, by a massive margin.

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