EDIT: Only 463439129036942 billion years, taking into account that there are effectively only 2^160 addresses.

"""Coincidentally, 2276709 is also the telephone number of a flat in Islington where Arthur once went to a party, met a nice girl, and lost her to a party-crasher. While the flat and telephone have been demolished along with Earth, they are forever linked to the fact that Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect—against all odds—are rescued 29 seconds after being ejected from the Vogon spaceship."""

I doubt whether this would get far past 1 billion a second though.

If you can't exponentially increase the amount of power / transactions you don't really have a chance of figuring out a collision.

100x machines with a computation that takes 100 billion years is still 1 billion years.

2^256 is a very large number. If you could build a computer that required a single atom, and could test the balance of a single account in a single nanosecond, and then converted the entirety of the earth into such computers, it would take ~2.8 million years for you to check 0.01% of all accounts.

Brute-forcing modern cryptography isn't something that can happen. The magnitude of 2^256 is close to the count of atoms in the entire observable universe.

"... brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space."

https://security.stackexchange.com/a/82412

I've always heard that even 2¹²⁸ is significantly larger than that number (which is closer to 2⁸⁰). This page seems to support that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Matter_con...

(BTW, when converting 10^x to 2^x, times 3 is what I use for very rough back of the envelope estimations. Times 10/3 is actually almost precise, as log2(10) = 3.32…)

or, to put it in simpler terms,

10^3 = 1000 ≈ 1024 = 2^10

2^265 < 10^80 > 2^266

So it's only 0.1% of the number of atoms in the universe?

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2%5E256 > ≈ 0.0012 × the number of atoms in the visible universe (≈ 10^80)

Anything past detection and panicking might be overkill tho.