I hope this is not a Stupid Question about Offline Paper "Wallets" :(

[emp3000]

Hi, I get that paper wallets generated by bitaddress.org are actually single keypairs and not wallets necessarily, so say if one used their website via their zipped project from github and did the random keypair generation offline, would there be a chance that the keypair of public and private addresses you got have been also generated offline by another user elsewhere? So is there a chance that the same randomly generated pair has another instance by another user who just did the exact thing. just a coincidence? Or how is this avoided?

Also, so the addresses you generated from a site like that, they don't have or use signatures, right, so there is less chance of them getting compromised?

Thank you so much and happy holidays to you all and best of health to everyone

[niothor]

Hi, I get that paper wallets generated by bitaddress.org are actually single keypairs and wallets necessarily, so say if one used their website via their zipped project from github and did the random keypair generation offline, would there be a chance that the keypair of public and private addresses you got have been also generated offline by another user elsewhere? So is there a chance that the same randomly generated pair has another instance by another user who just did the exact thing. just a coincidence? Or how is this avoided?

Also, so the addresses you generated from a site like that, they don't have or use signatures, right, so there is less chance of them getting compromised?

Thank you so much and happy holidays to you all and best of health to everyone

Taking into account the number of combinations , it's more probable you'll be hit my lighting 4 times during this month.
Of course , there is still a chance

[mu]

Not a stupid question, I wondered the same thing at first.
Turns out the cryptography used when creating keys is complex enough that the chances of two identical keys being created is basically zero.

User Pieter Wuille explains it better than I can: "Since there are around 1.4*10^48 possible addresses, the chance that a duplicate is found can be calculated using the birthday problem as 1-exp(-(4*10^17)^2/(2*1.4*10^48)), or approximately 0.000000000005%, which means one in 20000 billion.

For all intents and purposes this chance can be considered 0."

[ajax3592]

Chances are very-very low. Go ahead and make your wallet, the way you chose is the safest!

[emp3000]

  Thank you guys, but what about this thing I read the other day in #bitcoin in freenode IRC, that addresses are only supposed to be used only ONE time to receive, to avoid more than one signature. I thought addresses are fine to receive multiple transactions, only remember to withdraw and sweep it one time. Don't these keypairs from bitaddress have no signature to begin with?


They highly recommended armory for making the real paper wallet. Should I use that instead?