[Cryptography] BitCoin Question - This may not be the best place to ask

[Robert Christian]

On Sunday, December 22, 2013, Steve Weis wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 21, 2013 at 5:45 PM, Robert Christian
> <robertjchristian at gmail.com> wrote:
> > What’s to stop someone from gaming the system and creating millions of
> wallets, increasing their odds of accidental deposits?  If nothing else you
> could conceive of a DOS attack of sorts, where the addresses are all burned
> up.  This seems like a major flaw to me.
>
> Bitcoin addresses are hashes of ECDSA key pairs:
> https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_Bitcoin_addresses
>
> If by "burning up" addresses you mean generating every key pair and
> storing it, that's not going to be feasible since Bitcoin uses
> Secp256k1 with 256-bit private keys.
>

>>>

Not saying "generating every key pair and
storing it". Saying generating a sufficient number of keypairs...


Thing is, I haven't seen a collision resolution strategy... just a general
sentiment that "there is an extremely low possibility for collision."

1) Understood that IDs are a hash.  I guess I wasn't very articulate in the
initial question because it seems as if the responses so far are answering
other questions, such as "what if someone just tried to spoof an address"
or "what if someone tried to create all possible key value pairs and store
them" ... I am not asking either of those questions (but closer to the
latter).

2) I am pointing out that addresses are finite, and 34 chars long... They
can only be upper or lower case, or 0..9.  So at the end of the day, after
all the fancy stuff, the number of all possible bitcoin addresses
is (26*2+10)^34 possible unique ids.

So the number of possible unique addresses is actually relatively smalll.
 Right?

I understand that to use the address you need to have generated the keypair
prior/same time.

But you don't need to create *every* possible keypair... Just enough
keypairs such that the hash output represents enough unique hashes to
represent a small fraction of the unique ids.  Then you'll start seeing
collisions.

So my question is "what am a missing with respect to thinking we'll start
to see collisions happening at a rate that makes the system cost
prohibitive?"

If we get past that point the question is "what is the hash resolution
strategy?"

And if we got past that one, and with no solution... Then the question is
why is Bitcoin trading at $650 per USD?  :)

I  am sure I am missing something here... Haven't found it yet though...
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