Are you one of BitCoin holders? If yes, you surely have a BitCoin address where you keep your coins. It is natural that digital currencies are usually kept in the wallets and cryptocurrency is not an exception. However, how many bitcoin addresses are there?
You will agree that today millions of people are BitCoin holders who possess addresses on the Internet and store them there.
Look: this article will tell you about the number of BitCoin addresses existing and to be registered in the future and whether it is enough for the population of our planet.
What is a BitCoin address?
Similar to a customary email address BitCoin address is a possible destination of the payment made in BTC. This destination is identified by 26-35 characters which involve both numbers and letters and is free to open and use. In general, there are three types of addresses distinguished:
- Ones beginning with number 1 are called P2PKH.
- Ones beginning with number 3 are called P2SH.
- Ones beginning with bc1 are called Bech32.
Every new transaction can be performed only to a unique BitCoin address, so new addresses are generated each time a person makes a payment request. Modern BitCoin addresses can be online and offline (hardware wallets). Moreover, experts advise to copy-paste these addresses or you can easily mistype them (especially capital letters) and be rejected to make a transaction.
BitCoin addresses are created using public keys. Firstly, the last ones are hashed by SHA256 algorithm and only then by RipeMD160 algorithm. It is almost impossible to generate an address using even the most powerful code generator. No wonder that BitCoin addresses are famous for their security which is achieved by generating a new one for each transaction.
How to register a BitCoin address?
If you think that you need to spend hours to create a new BitCoin address, you are mistaken. You can open any exchange or platform which can be used for this purpose and click a single button ‘New Address’ to be assigned one. Follow a simple and quick registration process and your address is ready for use.
What number of bitcoin addresses is there now?
BitCoin is known for using RIPEMD160 hash function, so it means that the BitCoin address is a 160-bit number. As a result, it was estimated that there are 2/160 addresses which is equal to the following number: 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976.
Naturally, this number of all Bitcoin addresses does not have a name so many experts call it ‘astronomical’.
You may ask if it is enough for people? Even if all the population of the planet estimated at 7.4 billion people decides to register Bitcoin addresses, each of us will get 196,385,600,286,334,710,857,791,565,804,391,698,421 addresses to use. It is more than enough for every single person, right?
One of the BitCoin users has made an interesting count. He supposed that if the number of such planets as the Earth with the same population was equal to the number of sand grains (their rough number is 9 quintillion grains), each of these people will have 3.5 billion addresses for their lifetime.
It is important to mention that every person can have an unlimited number of BitCoin addresses. However, even if any person will generate a new address every minute without breaks, his life will be too short to use all of the addresses meant for every person on the globe.
How many BitCoin addresses can be created?
It may sound strange, but even if the mankind once needs to generate more BitCoin addresses, it is enough to add one character to the number in the line and people will get another ‘astronomical’ number of addresses to use. Who knows how many years it will take to use all of them?
Conclusion
There are things which are difficult to believe and the number of BitCoin addresses is one of them. However, it is not difficult to.