i was creating some paper wallets today and was wondering if its possible or even probable for another address to be the same. I think I've seen this question asked before, but Im not that technical and was wondering how that works. I always assumed that when a new address was created it would store that address in the chain or at least could be found. but when I was making paper wallets that never touched the internet it got me thinking..
Could someone explain in laymans terms how we can generate an address with a private key and be assured that someone else doesn't have the same one? I know its a very simple question, and probably a simple answer..
This is called "address collision", and it is mathematically improbable.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Definitely_not_a_problemGenerating tons of addresses
Generating an address doesn't touch the network at all. You'd only be wasting your CPU resources and disk space.
Also, a collision is highly unlikely.
Keys are 256 bit in length and are hashed in a 160 bit address.(2^160th power) Divide it by the world population and you have about 215,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses per capita.(2.15 x 10^38)
There are other threads on this subject:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=62https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=309603https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=254559And also:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ylis1/collision_probability_for_bitcoin_private_keys