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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • What’s fun is how often this principle is used every day. For example, when you upload a video to YouTube, you’re assigned a unique URL, but it would be too slow to simply add your URL to a list to make sure nobody else uses it. There are millions of videos uploaded every day, and thousands of servers spread all over the world.

    Instead, YouTube just generates a truly random URL and depends on the odds of two videos having the same URL being effectively zero.

    The same is true for Bitcoin. If you could guess a Bitcoin private key for any currently used wallet, you’d have full access to the funds within that wallet. This can even be done offline. Even if you could guess trillions of private keys per second, the odds of you hitting even one that’s already been used is low enough to be totally secure.