what if someone tries to genarate a huge number of bitcoin addresses....

[theomar]

what if someone tries to generate a huge number of bitcoin addresses for himself (99,99999...%)? I think that the possible number of genarated addresses  is enormous but not infinite. So is there any restrictions of preventing someone of doing it? Is this senario possible?

[1715292042]

1715292042

[notme]

what if someone tries to generate a huge number of bitcoin addresses for himself (99,99999...%)? I think that the possible number of genarated addresses  is enormous but not infinite. So is there any restrictions of preventing someone of doing it? Is this senario possible?

Odds are mining with that computational power would be vastly more profitable.  It would take millions of years to generate one percent of addresses with a supercomputer.

[kokjo]

LOL! you are a cute little newbie!

someone "could" generate all the addresses.

BUT it is 1.46150164 × 10^48 addresses we are talking about, and thats many many, and it would not be possible to have them in storage. it would be like counting all the sand grains in the world at least a few billion times

the basis of an address is the hash of the public part of an ECDSA-keypair.

so not its not possible. not even with new technology.

[Gabi]

what if someone tries to generate a huge number of bitcoin addresses for himself (99,99999...%)? I think that the possible number of genarated addresses  is enormous but not infinite. So is there any restrictions of preventing someone of doing it? Is this senario possible?

Call me when you manage to generate 99,99999...% of all possible addresses.

It would take millions of years to generate one percent of addresses with a supercomputer.

You are very very wrong.

It takes like more than the age of the universe to generate less than one percent of addresses with entire planets of supercomputers

[theomar]

thanx!

[DeathAndTaxes]

Common misconception

2^256 doesn't look very big.  I mean it is just 256 little bits.  Hell we have 2^64 computers right now and 2^32 is already a limit for memory beyond 4GB in windows.

2^256 is so large that conceptually if you took the largest visualization of it you can come up with and then squared it you would likely still be off by many magnitudes.

[kokjo]

It would take millions of years to generate one percent of addresses with a supercomputer.

You are very very wrong.

It takes like more than the age of the universe to generate less than one percent of addresses with entire planets of supercomputers

and you are very very far off.
maybe all the planets, filled with huge supercomputers(preferably AMD GPUs, not NVIDIA), in a BIG galaxy, would generate you around 0.01% in the age of the universe.

[kokjo]

Common misconception

2^256 doesn't look very big.  I mean it is just 256 little bits.  Hell we have 2^64 computers right now and 2^32 is already a limit for memory beyond 4GB in windows.

2^256 is so large that conceptually if you took the largest visualization of it you can come up with and then squared it you would likely still be off by many magnitudes.

correction, bitcoin addresses used Ripemd-160, to hash addresses, so you would only have 2^160 not 2^256.

but its still HUGE!

[DeathAndTaxes]

Common misconception

2^256 doesn't look very big.  I mean it is just 256 little bits.  Hell we have 2^64 computers right now and 2^32 is already a limit for memory beyond 4GB in windows.

2^256 is so large that conceptually if you took the largest visualization of it you can come up with and then squared it you would likely still be off by many magnitudes.

correction, bitcoin addresses used Ripemd-160, to hash addresses, so you would only have 2^160 not 2^256.

but its still HUGE!

Good point.