Excellent analysis OP, and quite an interesting read for the Bitcoin enthusiast.
Thx!
How could this have happened? How could Bitcoin be transferred to an address that it can't decode when Bitcoin has a check-sum that does not allow you to send to addresses that don't exist (i.e. mistakes typing)? I guess what I'm asking- if it could "read" the address the first time to send an output to it, why couldn't it read it again?
I apologize if that sounds stupid; I love the technology in Bitcoin but am not the top expert on it.
This thread explains some of them:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/unable-to-decode-output-address-non-standard-transaction-130392Still learning about the generation of public & private keys, but why is it so unlikely that people don't have the private keys for these strange addresses? Is it because it would be relatively quick & possible to process through all possibilities of addresses to find one containing those letters/numbers there in order to be able to find a matching public key to send transactions to it? But take exponentially longer to both find a matching (to selected letters/numbers) public key and a private key that matched that address?
The odds of generating one of those addresses from a known private key are 1 in 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976.
The number is so large it is difficult for humans to comprehend.
To try and generate one of these from a known private key, each human currently living on the planet has to generate 500 million of addresses for each single nano-second (10⁻⁹s) during the entire age of the universe (15 billions of years).
Simply coming up with a valid public address that contains certain characters is much easier, on a cosmic scale...
