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You could check a lot more than 1B address per second.

Not easily, as you need to do an elliptic curve point x scalar multiplication, which takes tons of cycles on a CPU and even tons of gates on an ASIC. Please provide a link to hardware that can do it much faster...

Two or more of whatever you are using to perform the calculations? I mean it won't appreciably shorten the search time but it would double the processing rate.

There's kind of a reason you don't count the coefficient in big O notation etc. It doesn't really matter.

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.

I'd guess a GPU at 2Ghz (2. Billion per second) might run parallel enough to compensate for the number of cycles required for a given point.

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

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