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Title: How many addresses can generate one private key? Post by: filord777 on May 02, 2014, 05:11:28 PM I hear that one private key can generate many addresses. Is it possible to generate a million addresses by only one private key?
Title: Re: How many addresses can generate one private key? Post by: BurtW on May 02, 2014, 06:10:51 PM You have that backwards.
On average a single Bitcoin address will map to 2256-160 = 296 key pairs. That is way more than a million. But a given key pair will map to only one Bitcoin address. (Well a key pair has two possible representations so in fact there are two Bitcoin addresses for each key pair because the two different representations of the public key: compressed and uncompressed, each map to a different Bitcoin address) Title: Re: How many addresses can generate one private key? Post by: byt411 on May 02, 2014, 10:46:28 PM You have that backwards. On average a single Bitcoin address will map to 2256-160 = 296 key pairs. That is way more than a million. But a given key pair will map to only one Bitcoin address. (Well a key pair has two possible representations so in fact there are two Bitcoin addresses for each key pair because the two different representations of the public key: compressed and uncompressed, each map to a different Bitcoin address) Exactly. Your question is incorrectly phrased, addresses cannot generate private keys, it's private keys that generate addresses. |