3 ms·
Obligatory reminder about the birthday problem - the probability that someone birthday is a particular day is 1/365, but the chances of two people in a group of
by sudhirj 5y ago
Obligatory reminder about the birthday problem - the probability that someone birthday is a particular day is 1/365, but the chances of two people in a group of 30 having the same birthday is very high - because the universe has so many combinations of people to work with.
The chances of hitting a particular wallet you want to hack are 1/2^256 or some absurdly minuscule number, but the chances of hitting some wallet are higher because there are so many opportunities to get lucky.
- nielsole 5y agoEven if there were 10^18 wallets your chance of finding any private key is effectively zero
- sudhirj 5y agoYeah, but people seem to have found wallets already. This is more a reminder that the probability is a little different from the naive 1/total possibilities idea.
- FabHK 5y agoThe birthday paradox speaks to the probability of having a collision, though - in other words, if you randomly try wallets, the probability that you hit one again that you've tried already. That probability is higher than the probability of hitting a non-zero wallet, once you've tried more wallets than there are non-zero wallets. The birthday paradox says that you need to try sqrt(N) before you have a collision, while here we still need to hit N/k (where k is the number of non-zero wallets) before we find a non-zero wallet, and the latter number is much bigger than the former.