Getting my head round it.

[Joshster]

OK, I kind of understand the whole cold wallet and hot wallet thing. But say if the odds really did happen and someone had a cold wallet with 1000 Coins and then someone had a Online already in the blockchain wallet with 50 coins. If someone connected that cold wallet to the internet would the 1000 coins go to the other guys wallet with 50.

[deadweasel]

OK, I kind of understand the whole cold wallet and hot wallet thing. But say if the odds really did happen and someone had a cold wallet with 1000 Coins and then someone had a Online already in the blockchain wallet with 50 coins. If someone connected that cold wallet to the internet would the 1000 coins go to the other guys wallet with 50.

coins never go anywhere.  just the keys to those coins.

and i have no idea what scenario you're trying to sort out.  details?

[Joshster]

Just curious, say.





I had 5000 coins, I put them into a cold wallet. If some how the cold wallet's address was the same as a wallet already online on someone's PC if they decide to make that wallet come online would all the coins on the cold wallet get transferred to the online wallet.

[Stephen Gornick]

I had 5000 coins, I put them into a cold wallet. If some how the cold wallet's address was the same as a wallet already online on someone's PC if they decide to make that wallet come online would all the coins on the cold wallet get transferred to the online wallet.

The way it works is confusing because the plumbing underneath is actually different from how it is presented.

Coins don't actually get held in a wallet.   The blockchain is a transaction ledger, and every full node with a blockchain has a copy of it.  The only thing in the wallet on your client essentially is the private keys that allow you to spend the funds for certain addresses.

Because people are familiar with the term wallet, since there is one in most back pockets and purses, that's what the clients try to emulate.   So the Bitcoin clients use the same concept of receiving and sending money as you have with a physical wallet for cash, but that's simply not what happens.

When you send a payment, you are simply broadcasting your permission for value to be transferred from previously received transactions to new bitcoin addresses.

When you receive a payment, that is simply the client showing a filtered view of the blockchain ledger for a specific address.


So yes, if someone has a private key from a cold wallet and that key is already elsewhere in an online wallet, either of those has the ability to spend the funds.  The network only cares which one spends them first.   The second attempt will be rejected as the funds have already been spent.

[Joshster]

Isn't that scary for people with huge amounts of coins.

[cbeast]

Because of the size of the numbers used in Bitcoin, the odds against an address collision are beyond astronomical.

[Stephen Gornick]

Isn't that scary for people with huge amounts of coins.

Isn't what scary?  [Edit: Oh, ... your concern is over the address collision risk.  See below:]



 - https://i.imgur.com/fYFBsqp.jpg

[uMMcQxCWELNzkt]

Isn't that scary for people with huge amounts of coins.

Isn't what scary?  [Edit: Oh, ... your concern is over the address collision risk.  See below:]



 - https://i.imgur.com/fYFBsqp.jpg

This does not account for aliens and other beings that are capable of manipulating the Universe, time to dump my coins.

[BookLover]

This does not account for aliens and other beings that are capable of manipulating the Universe, time to dump my coins.

USD and all other fiat fail to account for that as well.

[niko]

Isn't that scary for people with huge amounts of coins.

There is nothing scary. My private keys are private - it would be extremely hard and risky for anyone to attempt to get them without my authorization.
If your concern is somebody by chance generating an identical private key elsewhere - see above. Concern dismissed.

[doobadoo]

in laymans terms, what he is saying is that if you built the most energy efficient computer possible, you could not generate all the possible public keys that the ECDSA curve has to offer, using all the energy of the sun.

Now the number of addresses is a somewhat smaller number, so there are multiple possible pubkeys for each address. But pay that no mind as there are still a poopload of available addresses.  58^33 to be exact.  How big is that number?

170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

I may have hit 1 too many/few zeros...

Your current computer could probably only generate a few thousand of those key pairs a second.

All the computers on earth, if running just this generation would probably fail to get there before the proton decays.  And when the proton decays, we're all fucked, regardless of your bitcoin balance.