Would it be principle possible to own all bitcoins?

[jonald_fyookball]

Thought it would be fun to see just how
big of a wallet you would need here.

some ROUGH calculations

- 75 billion address key pairs can be stored using 1 terabyte.
- each terabyte can fit into a tiny hard drive measuring 35 cubic centimeters
(Samsungs' new harddrive that is about the size of a business card and maybe .7 cm thick)
- 1 cubic meter has 1M cubic cm
- 28,571 terabytes per cubic meter.
- 2^160 total bitcoin addresses
- 1.94 * 10^37 terabytes to store all those addreses.

Therefore, your wallet requires 6.8*10^32 cubic meters.

Given that the earth is a little more than 10^21 cubic meters,
your wallet would be the volume equivalent to 680 billion earths.

[PsursV]

if you have such a huge amount of money to buy all the bitcion still mined which is all most impossible then certainly you can own all bitcoin. other wise you have no right to own some one's property.

[RodeoX]

Thought it would be fun to see just how
big of a wallet you would need here.

some ROUGH calculations

- 75 billion address key pairs can be stored using 1 terabyte.
- each terabyte can fit into a tiny hard drive measuring 35 cubic centimeters
(Samsungs' new harddrive that is about the size of a business card and maybe .7 cm thick)
- 1 cubic meter has 1M cubic cm
- 28,571 terabytes per cubic meter.
- 2^160 total bitcoin addresses
- 1.94 * 10^37 terabytes to store all those addreses.

Therefore, your wallet requires 6.8*10^32 cubic meters.

Given that the earth is a little more than 10^21 cubic meters,
your wallet would be the volume equivalent to 680 billion earths.

[Kprawn]

Thought it would be fun to see just how
big of a wallet you would need here.

some ROUGH calculations

- 75 billion address key pairs can be stored using 1 terabyte.
- each terabyte can fit into a tiny hard drive measuring 35 cubic centimeters
(Samsungs' new harddrive that is about the size of a business card and maybe .7 cm thick)
- 1 cubic meter has 1M cubic cm
- 28,571 terabytes per cubic meter.
- 2^160 total bitcoin addresses
- 1.94 * 10^37 terabytes to store all those addreses.

Therefore, your wallet requires 6.8*10^32 cubic meters.

Given that the earth is a little more than 10^21 cubic meters,
your wallet would be the volume equivalent to 680 billion earths.

Holy shit, that puts everything regarding this question in perspective. I have never looked at it in that way before, but I doubt that your math is accurate. You did say ROUGH calculation, so it covers

the odd 80 billion earths you might have had too many.   .... I would like it, if someone could do the math and give us a nice graphical demonstration of this, just to have a single resource for people

who do not understand the impossibility of this scenario.   .... The closest I have seen was James's open mailboxes and sand comparison in one of his math explanations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHVKk7DHk

[Supercrypt]

Hey Guys,

I just got the following thought. If you would find a wallet that could hold all bitcoin addresses incl. there Private Keys, you should have all available Bitcoins in your wallet, or am I wrong? (It's just a theory)

Best regards,

Patrick

Basically, it is indeed possible to get a hold of all the coins that's ever made and will probably be made, with the fact that you contain all the private keys of all addresses that contains bitcoins and will contain bitcoins. You are basically the person who holds ~$11,000,000,000.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

Yea you could but they wouldn't be worth anything if you're the only that has any. For something to have value you need other people to agree that it is valuable, this is especially true in the case of purely digital items. Like if you got a couple of rocks and you think they're valuable, even if no one agrees with you, the rocks still have intrinsic value because you can use them to do stuff. If nobody else has BTC, the coins would be worthless to you as well because you wouldn't be able to use them for anything.

Oh but how much fun you would have squeezing the shorts!  Remember back in 1980 when the Hunt brothers tried cornering the silver market?  If you own it all, short sellers still have to buy it back to cover their short positions and you can charge them whatever you want...except it didn't exactly work out that way for the brothers.  The government stepped in and changed the laws, or the exchange did--I can't remember.  So much for free markets.

But yeah, there's no real practical purpose for owning ALL the bitcoin.

[zodin]

Hey Guys,

I just got the following thought. If you would find a wallet that could hold all bitcoin addresses incl. there Private Keys, you should have all available Bitcoins in your wallet, or am I wrong? (It's just a theory)

Best regards,

Patrick

Basically, it is indeed possible to get a hold of all the coins that's ever made and will probably be made, with the fact that you contain all the private keys of all addresses that contains bitcoins and will contain bitcoins. You are basically the person who holds ~$11,000,000,000.

how is it possible. i think some time some thing becomes so difficult that we consider it as impossible. so i think it is almost impossible to collect all the wallet key and address to own all the bitcoins of the world.

[brigadier2001]

It will be impossible go and own all the bitcoin out there because there is many who have their bitcoins stored or forget their private key so you cant get it all

[Wapinter]

I just got the following thought.

you didn't explain what your thought exactly is!

If you would find a wallet

what does this mean, you mean searching the internet or other people's computer to find their wallets.
or do you mean finding (creating bitcoin addresses) because a bitcoin wallet is file that is holding the bitcoin addresses + their private keys that your wallet application has created.

that could hold all bitcoin addresses incl. there Private Keys,

you have to create all those addresses + private keys and since there is 2^160 possible bitcoin addresses you will have to continue making addresses until the end of the world.

you should have all available Bitcoins in your wallet, or am I wrong? (It's just a theory)

yes you are wrong.

I think he meant to ask if it is possible to have such a online wallet that can hol all 21 million bitcoins in it

[outatime1]

It's not possible to have all the private keys. There are millions of private keys that you could never know and you could never guess them all or even one of them (most likely).