Let me to sum up and repeat:
1. I know that collision is impossible.
2. Most people do not know that collision is impossible.
3. In the transaction which sent 0.001 to my address, there were also hundreds of other addresses, to which 0.001 BTC was sent.
4. At least hundreds of people will receive random 0.001 BTC.
5. Since most people believe that collision is possible, then after receiving 0.001 random BTC, they will think, that collision happened (even if it didn't actually happen at all).
6. These hundreds of people will start to PANIC!!!
7. That is why this should be addressed/discussed/explained.

In real life analogy, this would be similar to someone walking around and throwing money at random people. If this actually happened in real life, I believe it would cause a HUGE panic, especially if left unexplained.

some people have no clue about maths and randomness

the only time to truly say that it would take trillions of attempts to collide is if there was only 1 address in existence that had the hex code of all F's and a brute force machine began at 0's in increments of 1 digit.

the reality is that there are millions of people using bitcoin all with atleast 2 addresses, and some merchants ploughing through hundreds of random addresses per day. making the amount of existing addresses quite high.

and those addresses are not at the end of the hex range. they are randomised throughout it.

so it IS POSSIBLE that out of trillions of addresses

the person can come across a used address on the 10th chance of brute forcing. and then never get a second positive result for the rest of the trillion attempts

the person can come across a used address on the 1 millionth chance of brute forcing. and then never get a second positive result for the rest of the trillion attempts

the person can come across a used address on the 1billionth chance of brute forcing. and then never get a second positive result for the rest of the trillion attempts.

research the word RANDOM..

hmm.. if this cannot be comprehended. lets simply it.

a 4 digit combination lock.

you say it will take 9999 attempts to brute force the lock open.. WRONG.

if i have the combination 0002 and another person had combination 0200 and 8 other people had other random numbers..

will it still take 9999 attempts to hit a used number..

it could take 2 chances or 9999 chances or any number inbetween....

your maths of the 2^160 is the MAXIMUM chances.. not the minimum...

collisions can happen..

sorry to inform you of this.. and now you knwo why gavin and TBF crew are dealing with this with version 9 of bitcoin-QT

I don't think that's the case.





There is a huge difference that I don't think you understand. You might get some math, and randomness. But you can't even grasp the difference between 1 trillion and 2^160.

Why not? This happened to me, I came here for an answer, and the first answer I got was "collision happened!".

I know that collision did not happen, because I understand bitcoin enough, so I did not believe this.

If there was someone else in my place, he/she may have very well believed that collision happened, after getting such an answer.

Let's be conservative, and assume all human beings on earth would use one billion BTC addresses each. If that's not conservative enough, I don't know what you need!

Then, the probability to generate a collision for a new address is still roughly 2e29. That is a 2 and then 29 zeros behind. That is a hundreds of billions of billions of billions. Forget about this possibility.

For franky1, you keep saying that because they are spread over the interval, a collision gets much more likely, but it does not dramatically reduce the probability as you seem to believe. In your example of 10000 possibilities, if there are 10 addresses in use, there are 1/1000 chance of collision, and on average you need to test 500 to find a collision. I did the same calculation in the large number above.

Additionally, forget about people spending money to "spread fear that a collision can occur". Only very few people would react in the same naive or paranoid way as you do, don't generalize.

My guess is you played satoshidice or something similar. It happens that the payout takes several days.

I came here, asked what happened, and the first answer was "collision happened".

I did not believe this answer, but is it really so naive or paranoid to believe, that most people would trust the answer, if it was given to them?

Besides, did you even read my post? What satoshidice has to do with anything, if I explained, that this address was never purposefully used? Why would satoshidice send BTC to random addresses? And no, I never played satoshidice or any gambling games, on any of my addresses (but even if I did, your "guess" would still be irrelevant).

_{p.s. offtopic - autocorrect suggestion for "satoshidice" - "dictatorship"}  

I also received 0.001 to one of my addresses from 1DSu8QqECJFFx9vmTp1MiT3PqHND6LLyTx.
I think it is dirty money and sender want to taint coins as much as possible.

Yeah, the first guy was trolling. That's why you got that response.



You keep on talking about a tiny 4 digit number lol.

YOU DON'T HAVE A FUCKING CLUE HOW BIG THESE FUCKING NUMBERS ARE.



... really? Now someone took it from a 4 digit number and reduced it to a low 3 digit number lol.

You guys need to seriously, take a college level math class that talks about exponents and... zeros. lol.



There are so many ways to try and explain this but the people that won't believe it, are probably not mentally capable of figuring out why.

It's just as big as I said. I never said it was bigger than every atom in the observable universe. I was saying stars. Which is already a pretty big number, atoms of course is even bigger.