You are kidding right.
This has been long debated in the forum and the odds are so low as to be ridiculous.
I mean theres tons of addresses out there so its like how could you not hit one
Because there are this many possible valid 12 word seeds:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456
And there only approximately 30 million bitcoin addresses with balance on them. Divide those two numbers and you get a roughly 1 in 11 million trillion trillion chance of finding a collision. (Now, this is not quite accurate since any seed can generate potentially billions of addresses, but you get the idea.)
If we were talking about 24-word combinations, they are exponentially much smaller.
1 in 11 million, trillion, trillion chance . . . reminds me of the scene from the movie
Dumb and Dumber...
https://youtu.be/nFTRwD85AQ4Recently I was visiting one of my friends who writes code, he brought up this topic to me recently saying that it seems like old wallets are being hacked into, that hackers have targeted older BTC addresses because of their vulnerabilities and lack of security.
I don’t know why people are always thinking negative about bitcoin, you noticed that some old bitcoin wallet’s are been activate, can’t you just think or make assumptions that the owner of the bitcoin is just trying to change wallet, must you think the wallet have been hacked? Any slight thing happening in bitcoin, then just negative thing that’s always coming to our minds, I think it’s just better we stop sharing negative news about bitcoin, let’s try and be positive.
Could it be that folks have figured out how to crack the codes on these old private keys? IF so, they are seeing some massive pay days, EH?
Maybe not, maybe the owner of the bitcoin just decided to move his bitcoin to a more secure wallet. Even if bitcoin have been inactive for long time, we all know the bitcoin belongs to someone, if the person haven’t lost his/her private key, then time will come when the person will activate the wallet, but that those not mean the person is trying to sell off the bitcoin or the wallet have been hacked.
I would never have automatically thought that just because an old wallet address
became active it meant it had been hacked, I would automatically think someone
was spreading FUD or just making wild assumptions.