A new Rabbit Hole answering the question that followed our vanity address posts, written as a credited recreation of James D'Angelo's 2014 Blackboard lesson:
Quindecillions: Why Nobody Can Stumble on Your BitcoinWhat's in it:
- The two spaces kept apart: 2^256 private keys, 2^160 single-key addresses (1.46 x 10^48, one and a half quindecillion), about 2^96 keys per address.
- The funded set from ChainQuery's weekly UTXO walk: 57,213,806 addresses at the 25 October 2026 snapshot, so one random key opens a funded address once in at most 2.55 x 10^40 tries. The Taproot (5,098,744) and P2WSH (up to 2,837,579) drawers a 160-bit search cannot reach are subtracted out in the text.
- What our 1.44 trillion vanity tries passed: a chance of 5.64 x 10^-29 that any one address held coins; the birthday bound at 1.42 x 10^24; the laptop, everyone-on-Earth and whole-network scale-ups in universe ages.
- Where the real stories come from: Castellucci's Brainflayer (DEF CON 23), the Brain Drain paper (884 wallets, 1,806 BTC, half drained within 21 minutes), and the weak-RNG table from the 2013 Android alert through CVE-2023-31290, CVE-2023-39910 and the July 2026 COLDCARD seed flaw (Optech #416), every one a search of a small space.
- The puzzle transaction scoreboard from the chain: record by hash160 search is #69 (2^68, 30 April 2025, block 894,620); the 2019-06-01 spend that exposed the public keys of 65, 70, ..., 160 and turned those into kangaroo problems (#135 fell 28 July 2026); #71 the lowest open at 7.1 BTC; the #66 mempool snipe. Plus the Large Bitcoin Collider at 2^55.87 keys on 28 October 2026, last find 15 November 2017.
- The no-registry payoff with its arithmetic: 8.2 billion people making one key a second for a century have about 1 chance in 4.4 billion of two matching addresses.
If any number, date or quote is off, say so here and it gets fixed and credited.
https://www.learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole/quindecillions
