I have no reason to lie about it. It doesn't benefit me to lie about finding a collision.
There needn’t be any material motive. Some people enjoy claiming to have done things declared impossible by mathematicians or physicists, as an end in itself. A few of them put on hoaxes so elaborate, so meticulously executed, that one wonders what they might have achieved if their energies were otherwise spent. But most are varying degrees of stupid and/or cracked.
Anyway, you seem to have missed that DannyHamilton conjectured another possibility—here put in boldface:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
I suspect two possibilities:
1. Neither the address, nor your search were properly random.
2. You are lying.
It is not
too unlikely that you made the same mistake in executing your “random” search as someone else did in generating keys to produce a “random” address—that you both introduced the same bias or nonuniformity. There do tend to be both common conceptual errors in implementation, and common use of specific erroneous implementations.
Randomness is hard to get right.I note you said upthread:
As I said, no math genius.
Quite retarded actually.
So, maybe you made a mistake somewhere.
I have no way of knowing if that’s what happened here. But as DannyHamilton said, it is a “possibility”. By contrast, randomly hitting one of a relatively negligible number of targets
uniformly distributed at random in a 2
160 search space may be safely excluded from the realm of all “possibility”.
It is true, however, that the
likeliest possibility is lying. Some guy on an Internet forum makes extraordinary claims which he freely admits he cannot prove “without trust” per below—what is the
likeliest possibility? Lying. Of course.
How does one prove the "impossible" when the majority says otherwise? Odds are not in my favor.
It has nothing to do with “the majority”. I don’t heed majorities. The content of my brain is not a democracy, and not subject to a vote.
I am confident I know what the sum of 2+2 is. I would not change my “opinion” of that sum even if I were the only person on Earth to have that “opinion”, or even if it were declared illegal. So much for majorities. Although I’m by no means a mathematical expert, I am also confident in my understanding of just how big a 2
160 search space is. Even if you were to randomly scatter a seemingly large number of potential targets (keys for all addresses controlling funds) throughout that space, the space itself is so vast that it would swallow them without a trace. Unless, that is, a bunch of targets wound up clumped in a tiny portion of that space. There are various ways to severely restrict the search space, directly or indirectly or both: Bad randomness generators, brainwallets, etc., etc.
(
N.b. that this is a problem very different than that of finding vanity addresses. It’s really offtopic in this thread.)
The hardest part of proving a collision is everyone's doubt. It's not impossible. I've done it. How can I prove it? I can't without trust that I am not trying to alter your mind with a lie.
Well, if you can’t prove it, then don’t expect for anybody to believe you. Is that a problem? Do you believe extraordinary claims posted on Internet forums, just because some guy said so? —Just because he seemed to sincerely believe what he was saying, and even
explicitly said that he had “no reason to lie about it”? If you do, I could easily find you a forum loaded with alien abduction experiences, religious miracle testimony, Bigfoot sightings, etc. Soon, you would believe all sorts of fascinating claims.
What it really boils down to is this:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
You made a positive assertion, which you readily admit you can’t prove “without trust” (as quoted above). This is a scientific question, not a religious topic or a matter of personal taste. The burden is on you to provide extraordinary proof of your extraordinary claim, if you want for anybody to take it seriously. I don’t need to explain and explore possibilities of what might really have happened; I have done these things because up to a limited point, I find the discussion to be interesting to me and an educational opportunity for readers (you and otherwise). Absent any new and extraordinary information, I think that limited point has now been reached.
If you can’t prove what you say, it’s no big deal; I will more or less just shrug and move on. “Some guy on the Internet said X.” I will not exactly “shit [my] pants” as you said, nor will I lose any sleep wondering about it or worrying about Bitcoin security. I know the numbers. Numbers don’t even know how to lie. Numbers don’t make mistakes.
Side note, mentioned for the sake of correctness:
As for security, you will shit your pants, on btckey.space I found an address with funds, tho it was a small amount (transaction fee) it was completely random.
An address can’t have a transaction fee in it. Fees aren’t paid to an address; they’re the part of a transaction’s outputs
not paid to an address, and spendable by the miner of a block.
Nobody. It's impossible, man.