Bitcoin Addresses

[wobber]

What if someone creates a malware, like a botnet, just to create Bitcoin addresses? Thousands per minute. How much would take to create all of the addresses? Also, what about collision risks? Can an address be generated twice? And what would happen if you send a bitcoin to that address if both are online?

[Ryo]

* It possible to generate the same address twice

* It is extremely unlikely, you're more likely to be hit by a falling asteroid next time you leave your house, several times in a row

* It would take millenia to generate all addresses if you generate only a thousand per second

* Coins are attached to addresses, not to online people. Two people who have the same address share the bitcoins attached to them, and won't notice until the other one spends some.

[ribuck]

* It would take millenia to generate all addresses if you generate only a thousand per second

Even if every computer in the world was generating a thousand per second, it would take more than a million times as long as the known life of the universe to generate a full set of addresses.

[Gavin Andresen]

There are:
  1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 possible bitcoin addresses.

As ribuck says, that is a very big number.  There are approximately:
133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

.. atoms in the Earth, so even if you used just 100 atoms to store each bitcoin address, you'd run out of atoms before you were done generating addresses.

[wobber]

There are:
  1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 possible bitcoin addresses.

As ribuck says, that is a very big number.  There are approximately:
133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

.. atoms in the Earth, so even if you used just 100 atoms to store each bitcoin address, you'd run out of atoms before you were done generating addresses.

Cool abstraction!