What are Address Collisions?
Bitcoin Address Collisions are when the exact same unique Bitcoin addresses have been created and used by different entities on the Bitcoin Network.
Given that Bitcoin addresses are basically random numbers it is possible, although extremely unlikely, for two people to independently generate the same address.
This is where the 160-bit hashes of their respective ECDSA public keys result in the same output. This is called a collision. If this happens, then both the original owner of the address and the colliding owner could spend the money sent to that address even if the address hashes had been created using different private keys. Despite this, it would however not be possible for one of the parties to spend the other’s entire wallet.
Due to the fact that the space of possible addresses is so astronomically large, it is more likely that the Earth is destroyed in the next 5 seconds than for a collision occur in the next millennium.
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