So I think there are about 300,000 bitcoin addresses containing at least 10 bitcoin, meaning we have a 300,000 chance in 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976.
of winning the bitcoin lottery
Anyway all jokes aside, Im not entirely sure I can realistically see bitcoin being used as "the" worldwide currency when its security is somewhat flawed. i know things will progress but until then, hmmmm just thinking
Let's assume everybody in this world would have 100 funded addresses:
this means there would be ~1000.000.000.000 funded addresses at any point in time
1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976/1000.000.000.000 = 1/1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019th of the address space would be used
Now, i've seen benchmarks of GPU's generating up to 23 Mh priv keys => pub keys => addresses per second (i hope this number is correct, i got it from a benchmark i found online => source
https://0day.work/using-an-aws-gpu-instance-to-generate-vanity-bitcoin-addresses/) .
Let's assume you're an evil genius and you build a farm with 10.000 GPU's generating 230 Gh addresses/second. 1 GPU works for 5? years before it breaks, costing $100/year. It runs at 300? Watt, costing 0.3*24*365*0.01 = $26 worth of electricity if you pay only 1 cent... Your farm would cost you 10000*$126 = $1.260.000 per year to maintain.
In order to find 1 funded address, on average it would take you:
2^160/(1000.000.000.000*230.000.000.000*24*60*60*365) = 201.495.273.494.322.970 years to find the private key belonging to one funded address... As long as the private key was generated by a perfect RNG. If you're talking about a botched RNG, this calculation no longer works.
Now, you're currently using FIAT money... Do you think your bank's centralised database is more secure or less secure than bitcoin's security? I mean, do you think that somebody who's willing to invest $1.25M per year for 201495 billion years wouldn't get his hands on your life savings in your bank account one way or another?
People's minds are just not able to grasp the number 2^160. As long as your private key is generated truely at random AND you keep your key 100% secure, your BTC wallet is a lot safer than your bank account... Offcourse, bitcoin falls victim to people using FUD, pump and dump scheme's, crooked wallet providers, hacked exchanges,... I personally think these are the main reasons why bitcoin isn't as mainstream as i'd like it to be (yet), but none of these reasons have anything to do about the fundamentals on which bitcoin has been built, only on human emotions and human mistakes.