Bitcoin Forum

Was just wondering (and too lazy to go facthunting) but has anyone an idea of how many btc addresses are in use/have been used, compared to the ones that are yet to be used? I've got like no idea what the orders are like...

What do you mean by "yet to be used"? All the possible addresses with zero balances?

its not possible to determine this (to my knowlege) without actually generating every combination possible, at least thats how i understand it.

if im wrong, im curious as to how this would be done

aren't the possible address 2^160? there should be a way to know how many have been generated, then you only need to subtract that amount

to my knowledge there is no way of knowing this unless you can parse the whole >7GB of blockchain and look for addresses that have been used.

there are some charts on blockchain.info that might interest you but nothing about what you want:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-unique-addresses : unique addresses per day
https://blockchain.info/charts/my-wallet-n-users : number of BC.I wallets (not addresses) created it is 6.5 mil

The possible number of bitcoin addresses is 2^160 but IIRC no one is counting the total number of unique addresses used. You could try to do this by analyzing the blockchain but that's surely going to be ersource intensive given the number of transactions in there.

As other have said, the possible amount of Bitcoin addresses is a lot - around more than the number of sand we have on Earth. I believe, It is possible to know the percentage of used Bitcoin addresses but it will take sometime. A lot of new addresses are created everyday by mixers and payment processors etc. However I do not think we have or will reach 50% anytime soon.

there's only around 2^63 grains of sands on earth. to get to close to the number of possible addresses you'll need to multiply that by approx a hundred and fifty octilion (150 with 27 zeroes). that's not close at all.

trying to find even 1 percent of those addresses will take a huge computing power.

I don't know how to get started counting... but let say if we have 7 billions users (the population of the whole world) and each generated 10k addresses, which will give 70 trillion addresses used/ever generated.

(70,000,000,000,000 / 2^160)
= 10^ [log (70,000,000,000,000)- log (2^160)]
= 10^ [log (70) + log (10^12) - 160 log (2)]
= 10^ [1.845 + 12 log (10) - 160 x 0.301]
= 10 ^ (1.845 + 12 - 32.164)
= 10 ^ -18.32
~ 10^ -18 x 100%
~ 0.0000000000000001% of all addresses
~ 0%

I think I am over-estimating but we are dealing with huge numbers...

As above, roughly 0% have been used.

Yup, goes to show that OP here is asking the wrong question. Estimating the total number of addresses used as a percentage of the total possible addresses is always going to give a very small percentage since hte possible addresses are so many.

Why exactly is my question wrong? I just had no idea there were so many possibilities. What would be the question i should have asked then?

No worries, it's good that you're learning. IMO a more meaningful question would be "how many different bitcoin addresses have been used so far?"

Oh sorry. Not a someone who is strong in science and math field here. That is what I heard from some other people on this forums.

Looks like I remember the wrong information. I apologize.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24268.msg304212#msg304212
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27zbwj/thats_a_lot_of_bitcoin_addresses_one_way_to/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3faio9/counting_sand_and_bitcoin_addresses/

https://i.imgur.com/gUpaqXY.jpg

* will edit my previous post.

Yes, thats more than the more than the number of sand we have on Earth. Bitcoins addresses are being generated everyday
and there is no likely hood of any storage of them. So this is something need not to be worried.

I assume op wants to know when will we run out of bitcoin addresses or he might considering to generate as many as he can in a hope that he would star selling them once there's a scarcity of bitcoin addresses.After reading the above figures,he must have abondoned his idea :D

OP you could have looked this up quickly with a single Google search. It was discussed in the past. Since nobody posted it, it might be worth adding:
Divide this by the population of the world and you end up with:

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[1] - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=24268.0
[2] - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Generating_tons_of_addresses

With all of the combination of letters and numbers, there are so many possibilities of addresses that we will almost never run out.

Running out of addresses would be a rather wonderful problem to have. As others have pointed out we have, er, rather a while to go.

But will the addresses run out when Bitcoin runs out?

While we're looking at how many bitcoin addresses people have "used", I just blew through 1,141,140,000 addresses to find this:

Pattern: 1waste
Address: 1wAstEA1dd1VZavt7TPu2URc3uik5Lezg
Privkey: 5HrJyVgPYPihx3tNXN7sHyuq9cDLMi73WWFW17Phbf7UKPkD9WY

 Now I didn't save them all as I was just trying to find one to make a point.  It took me ~3.5 minutes on my laptop to generate, compare and reject 1,141,139,999 addresses which didn't match 1waste*.  On my desktop I could do that in 1/8^th of that time or about 25 seconds.  At that rate over a period of one year I could generate about 2⁴⁹ addresses with my computer. If each of the 7.125 billion people in the world had the same capability we could generate ~ 2⁸⁰ addresses per year.  While that looks like a significant number, we would have to do that for 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 more years to generate all possible addresses.

Most of them are not in use... Maybe 80%...

thank you, this was exactly the explanation I was looking for :) cheers!

It is very probable that there are nearly 2 ** 160 bitcoin addresses, but it cannot be proved if all exist.

For a bit of background, lets examine a hash function. An ideal crypto hash algorithm would act as a random oracle, where every possible input generates an output that while discrete, is completely random. Random numbers, as in not necessarily unique.

For this example, we'll make it a (meaningless) 1 bit hash function. A coin toss. One random oracle hash function might have heads=1, tails=0. Another random oracle might result in heads=1, tails=1. Since the output values of the hash function are completely random, a case where two inputs have the same output value is a valid hash function.

In this simplest case, the chance that for any hash function the second output is a duplicate of a first one is 50% - a 50% chance that although the number of inputs is 2, the number of possible outputs is one.

This idea can be scaled up. For Bitcoin's RIPEMD-160, if we look at every possible 160-bit input (from 0 to 2^160-1), there will be many duplicate hash outputs if the algorithm is truly "random". A mapping of 1:1 input to output would be a non-oracle hash and breaks many crypto assumptions. Such expected hash collisions have been proven on other crypto hashes. For every duplicate, there must be by necessity one non-existing output value. There are not 160 bits of output for 160 bits of input.

The funny thing is that we aren't putting just 160 bits into RipeMD-160, the message we are hashing is the 256-bit output of SHA256.

For this case where the message is larger than the output, lets go back to our 1-bit hash. Lets say that our input message two bits; possible inputs are 00,01,10,11. All we have to do is look at all possible inputs, and then see if all possible outputs, both 0 and 1, were generated. A "1" output never being generated is still a possibility.

For our 2-bit message, it is easy to check whether we get all possible outputs. However when the number of possible outputs is way higher than the number of atoms in the universe, it is a bit harder.

It is very probable that even with a 256-bit input message that there are many ungeneratable Bitcoin addresses, from sheer probability, or further, from underlying hash algorithm biases or the mandatory non-oracle behavior in RIPEMD forced by using real-word algorithms.

no. of bitcoin address is larger than the no. of satoshi that will be mined

so just relax

LOL, before 50%, even before 0.00005%, there would be catastrophic address collisions that would destroy confidence in the system.

This is accurate.

no one can count it,too many address used,and maybe much more addresses not used,just generate and never used,or people make wallet and then leave it without any transaction,so complicate.

I don't think an exact statistics is actually ready but I think it would be far less than %0.01 of the number of total addresses generated, People generate a wide sum of addresses and there are address that does not even actually exist.