Creating a Bitcoin Receive Address Using Coin Flips | Need Advice

Wow, hold on a sec; If you're sticking to just 256 coin flips, that means you’re only looking at 256 squared possibilities for generating a bitcoin address. So you end up with only 65536 unique combinations to make an address. But a typical bitcoin address has a staggering 2^256 potential combinations, which is like 1.1579209e+77, or 11579209 followed by 70 zeros. Honestly, steer clear of this method. I really hope I'm mistaken and this could somehow work for generating a secure bitcoin address. Edit: You could also try flipping the coin 128 times and then for the next 128 flips, just flip the ones and zeros.

You're wrong. 256 coin flips gives 2^256 possibilities for a bitcoin address generation.

How? If you end up with 256 1‘s or 0’s  there is only 2 different combinations for each number. I probably am wrong.

Hello e1ghtSpace; Consider the very small and simple case of a 1-bit key. Combinations are as follows: 0 1 Now go up to a 2-bit key. You have 2 possible combinations of a 1 bit key, and 2 possible combinations of the new bit. 00 01 10 11 3-bit: 4 possible combinations of the lower 2 bits, and 2 possible combinations of the new bit. 8 in total. 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111 Every time you add an additional bit, you have all previous possibilities, multiplied by 2 (as the first, new, bit can be one of two possible values). Therefore a 1 bit key has 2 possible values; a 2 bit key 2*2 = 4 possible values; a 3 bit key 2*2*2 = 8 possible values; and so on and so forth, until an N-bit key has 2^N possible values. You can test this if you wish. Try counting from 0 to 31 in binary. See what you find.

Ah ok that makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation!

Depends on implementation. Physics behind the coin flip can produce true randomness provided the coin is ideal and the initial conditions are neither controlled nor predictable. In my view  for getting required randomness the tossing 256 coins at onceusing specifically designed gear is much better than flipping the single coin 256 times, because this approach minimizes the human relevant bias in the overall result. Besides, it saves your time.

You're responding to a (now deleted) 11 year bump. But if JanKoenig thinks he can guess my coin flips: go ahead!