Hey everyone! This is my first time posting here. I'm curious if there's any cryptocurrency out there that totally avoids hash collisions for wallets or private keys. I mean, the chance of it happening is super low, right? But still, if it could happen once... can it happen again? Just throwing this out there. I define a collision like this: a combination of a seed and a passphrase gives you a wallet.
CaPosts: 47 · Reputation: 109
So once, Novacadian told me about this wallet he made from scratch, expecting it to be empty. Turns out, he found something in it! If he didn't mess up or anything, how likely is it that someone else finds the same thing, like centuries from now or even sooner? I get that some bad key generator implementations might limit the keys they create too.
WaPosts: 164 · Reputation: 1361
I might be off, but isn't there still a tiny chance of a private key collision in Bitcoin? The total number of potential keys is massive, yet it's still finite. Adding a unique ID might not really fix the issue since the keys always come from a specific range.
Thanks for responding! You kinda get what I meant when I said seed A + salt A creates hash X, but seed B + salt B can also lead to hash X. So, hash collision could happen if two different seeds and salts give the same hash. True, the odds are super low, but adding an ID could help even more because you'd need to know that ID.
WaPosts: 164 · Reputation: 1361
Nah, you don’t need the ID to get a collision. A hash function like SHA-256 takes a big input space (like your seed) and makes it a fixed-size hash. So theoretically, you could have ID1 + seed A + salt A = hash X and ID2 + seed B + salt B also = hash X.
I don’t have a ton of technical know-how, but I’m not saying to just tack the ID onto the hash. I think the idea is to link the hash to an ID. Like, if you have the right hash, you can open up ID1. Kinda like needing to know an email address to access it, right? According to some info I found, SHA-256 only hashes the salt and password, not the user ID itself. Am I on the right track?