The theoretical possibility of two people generating the same public/private key pair or bitcoin address.
Questions tagged [key-collision]
22 questions
140
votes
11 answers
Is it possible to brute force bitcoin address creation in order to steal money?
Bitcoin users frequently generate new addresses for each transaction they make, which greatly increases the number of bitcoin addresses being used to receive money.
Would it be possible (and profitable) for someone to find collisions in the bitcoin…
nmat
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69
votes
5 answers
What happens if your bitcoin client generates an address identical to another person's?
Here's a what-if scenario:
Person A has a Bitcoin address with 25BTC.
Person B opens up their Bitcoin client:
which may or may not have the complete blockchain (the latter would
mean no copies of Person A's transactions)
Person B presses "New…
Austin Burk
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28
votes
3 answers
Is each Bitcoin address unique?
I am wondering whether each bitcoin address is unique. I would assume yes. Then, how is this enforced given the distributed address generation?
As I understand it, each time an address is generated, a new key-pair is also generated. On what basis is…
dexter
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9
votes
2 answers
Is a bitcoin address collision possible if generating 90 million addresses every 4 hours?
I am running a test to see if I can obtain a successful bitcoin address collision after generating billions of addresses. I am not entirely sure how I would check them yet. Basically I have an extra 10TB hard drive and am running supervanitygen on…
Anonymous
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5
votes
1 answer
How does the Bitcoin protocol deal with address collisions in wallets?
I understand that one can create a Bitcoin wallet as a pair of numbers (public & private key) with the right specifications and this is done quite easily in places like bitaddress.org
I also understand that the probability of generating two…
Calcutta
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3
votes
1 answer
Does the Bech32 address format decrease Bitcoin's possible address count?
I have wondered how many Bitcoin addresses are possible. When looking around, I stumbled upon this thread on BitcoinTalk:
There are exactly 2^160 possible addresses as long as we keep using
RIPE-MD160.
2^160…
ReneFroger
- 141
- 3
3
votes
2 answers
I am afraid of private key collision... What is the solution?
I know that there are a massive number of keys, but lets say that someone generate a private key that belongs to me.
I know that is nearly impossible. But I want to make that more and more impossible.
Is the Multisig Addresses is the best…
Sh Sh
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2
votes
1 answer
Hypothetical Scenario - Address collision with address with already confirmed outgoing transaction
In a typical case of finding a collision with an address, as long as the private key provided has a consistent public key that hashes to the address, then the coins in that address can be spent. The problem is that this assumes the collided address…
Expectator
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2
votes
4 answers
Is it wrong to spend Bitcoin from someone else's wallet if my Bitcoin client generates the same address?
I know this scenario is extremely unlikely but what-if by chance I get the same Bitcoin address as another user and the user has hundreds or thousands of Bitcoins in his wallet, is it morally/legally acceptable to spend the money from this wallet?…
David Lynch
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2
votes
2 answers
Wallet passphrase uniqueness (noob question)
The Mycelium Wallet has created a Bitcoin wallet for me, then I've written down a 12-word passphrase for the wallet backup. However it looks like a set of words (in the Mycelium) to generate these phrases is limited - at least I've got a passphrase…
HEKTO
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2
votes
2 answers
How to protect my private key from an unexpected new owner of the address that already belongs to me?
I understand that the situation I am describing is unlikely (because we have 1.46 Quindecillion possible Bitcoin addresses), but let's imagine that someone generated the same address as mine.
Is there any protection against a duplication of private…
user125245
1
vote
2 answers
Can Large Bitcoin Collider break into the wallet which is created by new version of Electrum?
I have heard that Large Bitcoin Collider can only break into wallets that are created by broken software.
My other question is that it seems the last private key that they found was on 2017-11-15 01:25:58 UTC. Am I right? Does it mean that their…
Iman
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1
vote
2 answers
Cryptocurrency with addresses that cannot collide?
I had originally posted the following question here:
Is it possible to have a cryptocurrency based on email address?
And now I have come across The Large Bitcoin Collider
I have read on Bitcoin Stackexchange and other places people writing how…
VCore
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1
vote
1 answer
Is there a BTC Address generator that will check first blockchain if unused?
I'm looking for a working implementation of a Bitcoin address generator that would accept string or integer then it will check the blockchain if the address is unused before it will print the keypairs.
Any repositories with similar function is…
Quin Noaj
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1
vote
1 answer
Proving collisions on Bitcoin addresses without discovery of the private key?
If there is a private key that leads to a collision on an address, it is possible to show that the private key is not the one used previously, even though they have a collision on the address?
Specifically, if there was a collision on one of the…
David Manheim
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