Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: smoothie on February 15, 2015, 12:37:14 PM



Title: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: smoothie on February 15, 2015, 12:37:14 PM
What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?

Same character order and case (upper or lower)...

Just curious if anyone knows the answer to this.


Title: Re: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: smoothie on February 15, 2015, 12:43:39 PM
Is it this?

1 in 2,207,984,167,552 = 1 / 58 ^7

given there are 58 valid characters to use and only 7 out of the first 8 characters are not constant.


Title: Re: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: bigasic on February 15, 2015, 01:09:13 PM
I know the odds of someone "cracking" your private key are astronomical, but you know that there are high end computers that all they are doing is coming up with private keys, you randomly guess tens of thousands per second, it wouldnt take long to find at least a few that would match..


Title: Re: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: coinableS on February 15, 2015, 04:55:07 PM
I know the odds of someone "cracking" your private key are astronomical, but you know that there are high end computers that all they are doing is coming up with private keys, you randomly guess tens of thousands per second, it wouldnt take long to find at least a few that would match..

Almost like playing a lottery right?
I've put a lot of thought into this and I created a script that was generating 20,000 keys per minute and stored the key pairs into a database.
The bigger issue I ran into was checking those addresses for a balance, that was much slower around 40 addresses per minute, since it was over the internet and had to check it against the blockchain.  The next HUGE issue was space. In just 14 hours I had over 15 GB of data storing ~20 million key pairs. The storage and checking these keys is a huge issue when trying to get lucky with a private key.

At this point I stopped and I did the math: if I had unlimited storage space and kept running the script for one year I would only generate 10 billion key pairs taking up 10TB of data, this is out of the 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 possible keys.


Title: Re: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: CIYAM on February 15, 2015, 05:03:35 PM
As a simple rule of thumb I'd estimate it would take the same time it took you to create such a vanity address (the OP was only talking about the initial characters - not an exact address match).


Title: Re: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: Reynaldo on February 15, 2015, 10:33:00 PM
I know the odds of someone "cracking" your private key are astronomical, but you know that there are high end computers that all they are doing is coming up with private keys, you randomly guess tens of thousands per second, it wouldnt take long to find at least a few that would match..

Almost like playing a lottery right?
I've put a lot of thought into this and I created a script that was generating 20,000 keys per minute and stored the key pairs into a database.
The bigger issue I ran into was checking those addresses for a balance, that was much slower around 40 addresses per minute, since it was over the internet and had to check it against the blockchain.  The next HUGE issue was space. In just 14 hours I had over 15 GB of data storing ~20 million key pairs. The storage and checking these keys is a huge issue when trying to get lucky with a private key.

At this point I stopped and I did the math: if I had unlimited storage space and kept running the script for one year I would only generate 10 billion key pairs taking up 10TB of data, this is out of the 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 possible keys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=504980.0 and here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156077.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139735.20

i couldnt find the post where DannyHamilton says "if you started generating keys at the start of the universe, you wouldnt even have 0.000003% of privkeys possible"


Title: Re: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: Jakesy on February 16, 2015, 03:37:28 PM
I know the odds of someone "cracking" your private key are astronomical, but you know that there are high end computers that all they are doing is coming up with private keys, you randomly guess tens of thousands per second, it wouldnt take long to find at least a few that would match..

Almost like playing a lottery right?
I've put a lot of thought into this and I created a script that was generating 20,000 keys per minute and stored the key pairs into a database.
The bigger issue I ran into was checking those addresses for a balance, that was much slower around 40 addresses per minute, since it was over the internet and had to check it against the blockchain.  The next HUGE issue was space. In just 14 hours I had over 15 GB of data storing ~20 million key pairs. The storage and checking these keys is a huge issue when trying to get lucky with a private key.

At this point I stopped and I did the math: if I had unlimited storage space and kept running the script for one year I would only generate 10 billion key pairs taking up 10TB of data, this is out of the 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 possible keys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=504980.0 and here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=156077.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=139735.20

i couldnt find the post where DannyHamilton says "if you started generating keys at the start of the universe, you wouldnt even have 0.000003% of privkeys possible"

Exactly this.

AND for a vanity keygen it takes computational time.  To compute the first 8 characters would take a considerable amount of time... let alone playing the lottery.


Title: Re: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: DannyHamilton on February 16, 2015, 04:03:49 PM
- snip -
i couldnt find the post where DannyHamilton says
- snip -

with increased probability and advancement in computer technology which let's say able to churn out approx one million of balance checks per second in 20 years time, how feasible would that be to find a seed that contain fund in it?

Keeping in mind that the age of the universe is currently estimated at 13.8X109 years old...

1 million is 1X106

There are 3.1536X107 seconds in 1 year.

Therefore, if you could "churn out approx one million of balance checks per second", then you could check 3.15X1013 addresses per year.

Therefore if you started generating keys and checking balances at the beginning of the universe (before stars, or planets, or life, or anything existed), and continued without interruption until today, you would still only have checked 4.35X10^23 addresses.

This means under those obviously impossible circumstances, you'd still have less than 0.00025578% chance of finding a collision by today.

So, go ahead and start trying in 20 years, and let me know how well you did when the age of the universe doubles.

This is just another of the several hundred threads on this forum that demonstrate just how bad the average person is at comprehending numbers that are VERY BIG.


Title: Re: What are the odds of creating the exact same first 8 character vanity?
Post by: SargeR33 on February 17, 2015, 12:16:29 AM
Such huge numbers. Such wow. Imagine a global botnet running scripts on millions of computers world wide to try generate random addresses and priv keys to get lucky. It would probably take half the age of the universe!