Creating off line cold storage paper wallets

[bigasic]

i was creating some paper wallets today and was wondering if its possible or even probable for another address to be the same. I think I've seen this question asked before, but Im not that technical and was wondering how that works. I always assumed that when a new address was created it would store that address in the chain or at least could be found. but when I was making paper wallets that never touched the internet it got me thinking..

Could someone explain in laymans terms how we can generate an address with a private key and be assured that someone else doesn't have the same one? I know its a very simple question, and probably a simple answer..

[gadman2]

Just use some epic source of entropy to create a wallet offline. Bitaddress.org does this well.

You can download the source and take it offline.

[raganius]

i was creating some paper wallets today and was wondering if its possible or even probable for another address to be the same. I think I've seen this question asked before, but Im not that technical and was wondering how that works. I always assumed that when a new address was created it would store that address in the chain or at least could be found. but when I was making paper wallets that never touched the internet it got me thinking..

Could someone explain in laymans terms how we can generate an address with a private key and be assured that someone else doesn't have the same one? I know its a very simple question, and probably a simple answer..

This is called "address collision", and it is mathematically improbable.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Definitely_not_a_problem

Generating tons of addresses
Generating an address doesn't touch the network at all. You'd only be wasting your CPU resources and disk space.

Also, a collision is highly unlikely.

Keys are 256 bit in length and are hashed in a 160 bit address.(2^160th power) Divide it by the world population and you have about 215,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses per capita.(2.15 x 10^38)

There are other threads on this subject:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=62
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309603
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=254559

And also:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ylis1/collision_probability_for_bitcoin_private_keys

[jonald_fyookball]

i was creating some paper wallets today and was wondering if its possible or even probable for another address to be the same. I think I've seen this question asked before, but Im not that technical and was wondering how that works. I always assumed that when a new address was created it would store that address in the chain or at least could be found. but when I was making paper wallets that never touched the internet it got me thinking..

Could someone explain in laymans terms how we can generate an address with a private key and be assured that someone else doesn't have the same one? I know its a very simple question, and probably a simple answer..

In layman's terms:  It is theoretically possible to generate the same address as someone else, but overwhelmingly unlikely (assuming that the random number generation used for addresses is working properly).   Simple enough?

The number of addresses is 2^160....which is a number 48 decimal places long.  (more than a trillion trillion trillion trillion).

[Maidak]

I bought myself a piperwallet from http://piperwallet.com/ and i hands down love it. I think not only is it a neat toy to put on my desk but I use it for coldstorage addresses as well.