So, I was thinking about the address generation scheme that is used for Bitcoin. Please note I did not do any math here yet to see if it is likely to happen, it's just a concept.


To my understanding no network communication takes place when generating Bitcoin addresses. It's basically done locally. From my understanding Bitcoin address generation is also predictable in the sense that generating the same address twice, while unlikely, will result in the same private and public keypair.

Now from what I understood, the chance of a collision (that you would get an address that already belongs to someone else) is possible, but so unlikely that it's discountable. All fine up to this point.

Now what if someone made a botnet generate addresses all the time, 24/7, and would import those addresses into a wallet.dat to try and see if someone else already generated the address, and has funds 'assigned' to it - essentially trying to find collisions? Wouldn't this be an extremely efficient way to generate addresses until an address was found that held funds, to then steal the funds on that address by transfering them elsewhere?

Is this a possible attack vector and if yes, how likely is it to succeed?