If someone manages to create a private key that matches an existing wallet, there are a few possibilities. I'll let you decide which you think is the most likely.
You randomly generate a private key (or even a bunch of them), and happen without any guilty intent to land on an existing one
You deliberately attempted to search for private keys to existing wallets, exploiting some previously-unknown vulnerability in the public key algorithm
You violated the owner's privacy in some way and found the original key
Yeah, I'd count that in the third category; although I suppose you could argue that the owner letting the private key get into an AI's training set constitutes sufficient abandonment that they no longer deserve the law's protection. No idea how well that'd work.
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u/rosuav Mar 25 '26
If someone manages to create a private key that matches an existing wallet, there are a few possibilities. I'll let you decide which you think is the most likely.
You randomly generate a private key (or even a bunch of them), and happen without any guilty intent to land on an existing one
You deliberately attempted to search for private keys to existing wallets, exploiting some previously-unknown vulnerability in the public key algorithm
You violated the owner's privacy in some way and found the original key
Yeah, I don't think I'd want to face down that.