Bitcoin Forum

Don't turn me into a laughing stock I'm just trying to understand what I don't know, since many more people keep coming into crypto space day by day is there any chances of getting your Bitcoin or ETH wallet compromised when newbies generates new address? It is possible that a bitcoin wallet can generate a wallet that's been in use by another user?

The 12 words seed phrase is gotten from 128 bits of entropy with 4 bit checksum making it 132 bits, or like on Electrum in which the 12 words seed phrase are gotten from 132 bits of entropy, this is enough to provide a seed phrase that is secure and safe enough. What can make you lose your coins is through wallet hack or careless offline backup. If you protect your seed phrase backup, making use of offline wallet and securing your online activities and maintain safety, you will be fine.

But, additionally, you can an add extra word also know as passphrase or extended word in which different keys and addresses will be generated entirely from the same seed phrase. In this regard, even if your seed phrase backup is known to someone, the person can not spend you coins because he does not know your passphrase that made the seed phrase to generate different keys entirely.

But note that your passphrase is needed along your seed phrase for wallet recovery, else, you will not be able to recover your wallet and this will lead to loss of your coin.

Of course, there are many ways in which your wallet can be compromised, but in summary that will only happen if you don't pay particular attention to security protocols on the network, protocols such as keeping your seed phrase/private keys to yourself alone, choosing the best possible wallet, taking everything that looks too good to be true as a scam, etc. If you don't want your wallet to get compromised, then you can beef up your security by going for a hardware wallet, which you can purchase for around $50, less or slightly higher, depending on the one you go for. Even if you don't go for a hardware wallet, make sure you use a non-custodial wallet because if it's not your keys, then it prolly isn't your coins anyway.
No. Whenever you 'create a new seed', it's unique to just you the creator, though if you lose your seed phrase to someone else they can always import your funds into another wallet using your seed phrase and spend it (in the same way you can as well), cause mind you that Bitcoins aren't actually stored in wallets, but on the 'network'.

The security of your wallet is actually dependent in you on how you protect your wallet. If you are looking for a high secured wallet the best recommendation is to use a Hardware wallet.

Generating a new address won't compromise anything except if your device or PC is already infected.

Never heard if there is someone who generates a wallet that has already been used by someone but if you are using Electrum wallet it should be unique.

I think what you are referring to is something called "bitcoin address collision"

I don't know much about the technicalities but from what I have understood, you have produced a new bitcoin address that is equal from an existing funded bitcoin address that is hashed from an existing public key. And, based on what I've read, it's theoretically possible, but the chances of getting the same address are extremely slim to the point that it requires extremely powerful computing machine to create it...

I know it may not be accurate but I think that's the gist behind bitcoin address collision.

Not really the one youll generated is new and your the first user to be able to use that. If there is some instances like that probably it will be a big issue herr on fourm but I think its 0 case. Cause if thats to happen then there is literally a big problem in the network. Your crypto will be compromised if you engage on connecting it to some phishing site or has been hacked by entering on malicious site.

There is no such thing as a stupid question, besides, on this forum, it is considered impolite to laugh at newcomers (unless they are trolls who mock or make laugh at other users).

As for your question: it all depends on the wallet you are using. If you use a "normal" wallet that generates keys randomly through a good cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator, you don't need to worry about the uniqueness and safety of your keys. Of course, it is theoretically possible for some user to generate exactly the same private key or seed as yours, but it is practically infeasible given that it is a number with 256 digits and the range is as big as the number of atoms in the universe. On the other hand, if you use insecure wallets such as brain wallet which instead of using good RNG, takes whatever password you feed it and generate keys from it. The chances that two users will choose the same password and generate the same keys are very high, so it is extremely unsafe to use such wallets.

Nothing wrong with your explanation, but we don't want to scare someone coming into Bitcoin with too much technical jargon that will make them change their mind. Seed phrases, entropy, checksums... might be overwhelming to OP.    

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@Cuda911
Address collisions are possible, but they are so rare that it's not worth worrying about. The most important thing is that you use a popular wallet that's been around for years and has been tested thoroughly. Open-source and non-custodial is the way to go. Non-custodial means that only you have access to the keys that allow you to spend your coins. Not the software, its developers, or some other 3rd party. Open-source means that its codebase is publicly available and verifiable. Even if you don't have the skills to inspect the code yourself, it's reassuring that others can and have done it.

I would be more concerned about getting struck by lightning 3 times during the same day. On a sunny day. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon, and once before I go to bed. This ridiculous comparison is meant to show how unlikely both of these scenarios are.    

I don't see any chances that other people like me can generate BTC or ETH addresses with you as this has different codes or seeds phrases every time we generate addresses. Perhaps, you can try it on your own in order to see it. of course, don't ever try using exchanges wallet as might happens especially when you are using scam exchanges. But as long as you are using Electrum and MEW wallet, that certainly impossible base on my experience and I don't see that someone had similar address to mine.

I am assuming OP talking about generating duplicate addresses and private keys. Till now I didn't hear about this issue and it wouldn't happen. Otherwise, the whole system will be broken and no one will use cryptocurrency anyway. Securing your wallet from attack is a different thing. It's your responsibility to keep safe. But the algorithm will never create the same wallet address or private keys. From this side you are safe. Just need to use an open-source non-custodial wallet. Otherwise, a hardware wallet is preferable.

It will take atleast 100 years with fastest computer on the earth to predict the same word what is already created which means it is close to impossible, also we never heard any story about someone randomly created recovery seeds of an existing bitcoin address so you are safe and no need to worry.

You are out by a few dozen orders of magnitude. If you were to build a computer which could churn out 1 trillion seed phrases a second, then you are looking at somewhere around 10 billion billion years to exhaust an 128 bit search space. Increase that to 256 bits, and the numbers become comical.

In short, to answer OP's original question: Yes, it is theoretically possible for your wallet to generate an already used address, but our sun will have engulfed the Earth long before that ever happens.

Really, few billion years? I didn't know the exact calculation I just remind that it will take atleast 100+ years to brute force written by someone from bitcointalk in the technical discussion thread and now its more interesting. :o

I was once curious about Op's question. Though OP  wasn't clear to me until I read your reply.
Before I visited the technical aspect of OP question, I was ordinary consoled by the fact that the address is alphanumeric, which will make it impossible to coicide.
But later I learnt that the strength of secp256k1 is about 2^128, and it's proven that anything higher than 2^90 is very much secured.

But I also ask if the blockchain doesn't have an algorithm to immediately detect an attempt of duplicate upon generating a coincidental address. Maybe this will be needful when the Sun must have engulfed the Earth according to o_e_l_e_o.

You can do the math yourself without too much trouble. For a 128 bit seed phrase, then there are obviously 2¹²⁸ possibilities. Divide that number by 10¹² (which is 1 trillion), and that's how many seconds it would take to generate all possible seed phrases if you could generate 1 trillion a second. Divide that by (60*60*24*365) to turn seconds in to years. Here it is written out: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%282%5E128%29%2F%2810%5E12%29%2F%2860*60*24*365%29 (https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%282%5E128%29%2F%2810%5E12%29%2F%2860*60*24*365%29)

No, it doesn't, and indeed, how could it? When you generate an address using any offline wallet, how could the network know that you have generated that address? And if you do import a seed phrase or private key and recover addresses which already have funds on them, then how could the network know if you had just generated them by chance or you were simply restoring a back up? You would need to create a central database of addresses linked to proof of identity, which obviously violates many of the core tenets of bitcoin. Instead, addresses are kept safe due to the sheer size of the math we are dealing with. (It's also worth noting here that the number of possible private keys and possible addresses absolutely dwarfs other things we rely on many possible combinations for, such as all your passwords, credit card numbers, SSNs, the coded radio signal of your car keys, for example).

For one new wallet get the same private key as an existing one?
Yes, it is possible. But please look at the following image to understand how many private keys are possible, and maybe you will understand how small are the chances to get the same private key as yours.
(And you could also read the topic I've quoted from (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5147514), it's interesting.

(click (https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/14/blobd6f51d2b35b1d9e0.jpeg) to make it bigger and more readable)


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PS. I think that the talk about 2^128 instead of 2^256 may just confuse OP.

I don't know much about bitcoin - but I'll take an example on the ERC-20/BEP-20 wallet (private key)

Example:
Keystore File
Mnemonic Phrase
private key

Access Wallet with Private Key: each digit number will produce a different seed even though there is a similarity of 1/2 digit number:

WALLET ADDRESS
0x4c93Cfb5B1b0Dc7F8404B16FBE3AA0202D2DA208

PRIVATE KEY
0x123450ea887a9a75a1dee7a1bdf9414544ffc5a4a72029ac6511b63cc00f224e

MethodID: 0x12345

it is possible and you can find out based on the wallet address you generate whether it has been used by other users before or not. (transaction history)

I could be wrong, this is just an example based on  my knowledge.

Agreed, but we should really be talking about 2¹²⁸ rather than 2²⁵⁶. Since secp256k1 provides 128 bits of security for your key pairs, then it is irrelevant whether your seed phrase is 128 bits, 256 bits, or even 4,096 bits; the resulting private keys will still have 128 bits of security.

I don't know if this is actually how it works in ERC or BEP tokens since I don't own any shitcoins, but that is a terrible design if it is accurate. Leaking a single private key allows someone to simply increment a single digit and derive all your other private keys? In bitcoin, sibling keys are derived from the parent keys using a one way hash function, meaning there is no relationship between sibling keys, which is an exponentially more secure design.

I don't know were this conception or thought came from, Bitcoin creation of wallet does not contribute or create any impact of supplying Bitcoin or ethereum to the wallet address without funding it by yourself, any cryptocurrencies wallet is something you have to fund, using banking system as illustration, bank doesn't credit anyone who opened account with them you been funds the account.

I like this explanation, theoretically possible, but not possible during human existence.

How about the 4 extra bits added during checksum, is this not providing any security, like adding more impossibilities for the already existing seed phrase to again be generated by another users which is refered by some people as collision? I have noticed what people concentrate more on about this is the 128 bits of entropy.

No, the 4 bit checksum does not provide any extra security in this sense.

The 4 bit checksum is generated deterministically from the 128 bit entropy. The same 128 bits of entropy will always produce the same 4 bit checksum. So although a 12 word BIP39 seed phrase does encode 132 bits of data, there are not 2¹³² possible valid seed phrases. For every 132 bit seed phrase, there are 2⁴ possible combinations of the 4 bit checksum, but only one of them will be valid. Given that, 2¹³² / 2⁴ = 2¹²⁸.

If you want more than 128 bits of entropy in your BIP39 seed phrase, then you need to use more than 12 words, with the most common alternative being 24 words, which provides 256 bits of security with an 8 bit checksum. Note that as I said above, however, your private keys generated from a 24 word seed phrase still "only" have 128 bits of security.

May be stupid question, still:
What if the private key is not generated from a seed phrase? What if the private key is just one random (may need better word here) number in the range of valid private keys? Would this provide the same 128 bits? Can't we reach 160? Or I'm confusing something?

It's a good question. The answer will always be 128 bits at most (obviously it's possible to generate a less secure key if you use a brain wallet, poor source of entropy, etc.)

Bitcoin uses the secp256k1 curve. The parameters of this curve state that all private keys will be 256 bits in length, but will provide 128 bits of security. This is because the most efficient way to attack a private key is to attempt to solve the ECDLP, which requires 2¹²⁸ operations.

It is not the method of generating private keys that limits them to 128 bits of security. Rather, it is intrinsic to the elliptic curve bitcoin is based on.

This can be seen in Standards for Efficient Cryptography. SEC 2: Recommended Elliptic Curve Domain Parameters. (http://www.secg.org/sec2-v2.pdf) (Table at the bottom of page 4.)

No, you are safe when it comes to generating new addresses lol, every wallet has basically two features, one is the public and the other is the private key and they are all very random and since all wallets are integrated to blockchain itself, it would never be possible for a generation of wallet which matches exactly the same which has all the same information and stuffs, the odds are astronomically low, or I would say, impossible!  ;D

The series of digits in each private key may be random, but the private keys themselves are not random - they are generated deterministically from your seed phrase.

I'm not sure what you mean here. There is no "integration" between a wallet and the blockchain. It is entirely possible to create and use a wallet which is entirely airgapped and never once connects to the internet, and so the network would have no idea of its existence. There is absolutely nothing at a protocol level or within the blockchain itself which prevents you from generating the exact same wallet as someone else. The thing which prevents this is the incomprehensible size of the numbers we are dealing with.

Perhaps, the "integration" means that wallets only create such keys and addresses that can be recognized by the network and which it considers valid to deal with. In other words, if a key or an address fails to meet a certain standard or format, it will not and cannot be "integrated" into the network.

Either it is inaccurate or I misunderstood the point you make. The network will have an idea about the existence of an air-gapped wallet that has never touched the Internet if some of the addresses the wallet controls have been associated with transactions that either were already confirmed by the network or are still sitting in a mempool.

Only when an address sends coins out can we say for sure that someone has created a wallet with the associated private key. I can generate millions of private keys and associated addresses offline without the network having any idea I am doing so. Similarly, I can send coins to any address I like, including one I've just made up and which the associated private key is unknown. Not only does the wider network not care, but indeed the wider network has absolutely no way of knowing. There is no "integration" between wallet and network in this manner, where the network somehow checks the addresses you have generated to make sure no one else has used them first or they do indeed have a known private key. The network doesn't even care if you send coins to unspendable outputs. All it cares about is that your transactions are valid.

Thanks for all your responses everyone there is surely a whole lots of things u learned just reading through every comments on here, thanks.

I totally love the motive behind OP's discuss, a pure desire and intent to learn and become better. It is with such a desire that knowledge quickly comes to someone. Rather than pretending to know, you have humbled yourself to ask what you do not know. I think such an attitude is merit deserving and should be emulated by others as well. I will definitely revisit this your post to encourage you with a merit as soon as i get to give.

Nope it's impossible  ;D I guess this is what makes some newbies to start importing recovery seeds they see online into iancoleman website maybe they can hit the jackpot but in the end they got served by getting scammed themselves.. not accusing just saying.

If you lack knowledge on a particular field,the best thing to do is to look for someone that is more experienced on that field,and seek for knowledge or advice on the course that you need.So many people neglect looking for the right people to guild them,and conclude that that course was not meant for them.
Every man should have a role model in life,someone that guilds them when they are in the wrong part.
So the best answer to you is to research or look for someone that is in the right position of rendering advice on the field that you need advice on,Atleast that will be the best for you.

Being a beginner I'm not well versed in all activities related to forum.My moto is to gain maximum knowledge by reading variety of informations shared in the site.I wish to know more about wallet,how to invest,though invested whether it's safe or not. likely how to put a quality post.Adding links will it worth it like lots of doubts is been emerging as time pass by. Lacking knowledge initially is not remarkable instead without any efforts makes the thing noted.

Read all the posts in this thread and you will gain some knowledge about how wallets work, how your seed is generated, what address collisions are, and how unlikely they are to happen.

After that, navigate to the beginning of the Beginners & Help board and check out the sticky threads. There is a thread dedicated to newbies written by Lauda, read that. Read Lauda's other thread about wallets (also a sticky thread).
Go to the Meta board and read the rules of the forum. There should be a link to the rules in Lauda's beginner thread as well. You need to know what you can and can't do around here.

I can recommend checking out Beginners & Help Encyclopedia [UPD: +Electrum Board.] (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5364418.0)
It's a huge list of everything you could possibly need. Bookmark it and go through the topics that you are interested in.

And generally, it's always a good idea to create your own threads when asking questions instead of hijacking someone else's. A little tip for the future. ;)
Good luck and enjoy your stay!

That's impossible but not a stupid question because many newbies don't know this, I've never witnessed any recovery seed having the same word phrases with another recovery seed no matter how many new wallets you creates.