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Now spead that across 10 million system admins. An actual MD5 checksum in the Wild is vasty more likely to be brute forced, or a bug. However, it's reasonably likely to have happened.



See my reply to the sibiling comment. I don't believe we've seen an accidential collicion yet.


Your math is off. You tried to calculate the odds that the next block would collide you want the odds that any of them would collide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

X!/((X^n) * (X-n)!)

It only takes 23 people to have a 50/50 shot of sharing a birthday.

On the plus side MD5 is 128bits.


No, I used a reasonable approximation. Sqrt(2^128) is roughly in the ballpark of what is needed to have 50% of a collision, in fact it is slightly lower than the actual number. Incidently sqrt(2^128) is 2^64, which is the number I used.




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