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But shouldn't that bound be astronomical?

GCM is like 4 billion messages, which is not astronomical at Facebook's scale.

Meta (we) process many billions of messages per second. Finding enough randomness is a thing at scale.

Per day? but not per second. would require every human being sending @ message every 8 seconds

Per second. Messages in the Kafka sense not the WhatsApp sense.

I'm fairly out of my depth here, but the birthday paradox is a harsh mistress.

Especially when the pool of possibilities is equally massive