BTW: When people say chances of collision is low they don't mean 'low' as people use the word in normal everyday life. In reality the chances are infinitely small. The chance of Sol going supernova in the next microsecond is considerably larger then the chance of a collision ever occurring.
For a properly generated address, right. But this one came from a closed source vanity address generator of dubious design.
The generator I used:
http://nyhm.net/bitcoin/vanity/The topic about the generator:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/simple-vanity-address-generator-v04-76038Note my
post above and at the
vanity generator topic.
One thing I want to make sure I understand: BTC are being sent
to your public vanity address, not taken
from it, yes? This is, of course, very important. It's a wild leap to go from receiving BTC at an address to considering the possibility of a collision. If BTC is ever taken
from the address without your direct intervention, then that's another thing. (Even in that case, it's much more likely your private key was compromised in some way, rather than a collision.)
So, I'm keen to follow this very interesting situation, and will assist in any way possible. Here's what folks can do (as will I): Run the vanity generator with the same first bits in question (or the whole thing for that matter). If anyone hits upon the target address, let us know (and prove it). In fact, if you can ever produce
any duplicate address, it would be remarkable, and the research would certainly be valuable for the Bitcoin/bitcoinj community (the generator uses the bitcoinj library to produce addresses).
(PS I actually have some updates in the works for this utility, but I'll keep the v0.4 version up there for now. Note the clear warnings on the page.)
EDIT: There's an (undocumented) command-line switch for non-gui searching. Try this:
java -jar VanityAddress-v0.4.jar TBZ --case-sensitive
