Luck or Bug? Newly Created Address Already Existed

[manuel10cf]

I was using MetaMask to generate addresses and one of the addresses turned out to be the same as one used a year earlier.

The address I generated on 03/28/2018 is 0xb8C059E31BcFa20B961d3F5A021b5C44d7DA57AE and it shows a transaction on 03/23/2017. You can see this and other past transactions here: https://ropsten.etherscan.io/address/0xb8c059e31bcfa20b961d3f5a021b5c44d7da57ae

Luck or Bug? Manu.

[jrmoreau]

Did you happen to get this seed phrase by way of using Truffle as a developer?

[nickoneill]

This address is for a simple brainwallet, it seems unlikely that it would be a common, well known key pair and also a collision.

I would like to see more details on what seed generated this address, but do not send or post metamask recovery seeds anywhere publicly.

[kumavis]

@nickoneill please don't eagerly suggest metamask users to post their seed phrase

while it would be a small miracle to find a collision and it would be "neat" to see one, its unlikely what the user has actually encountered

[kumavis]

@nowapoca did you use the seed phrase previously or publish it anywhere? addresses are deterministically generated from the seed phrase, so the first, second, nth address will always match for a given seed phrase

[nickoneill]

@kumavis you're right, bad form on my part. I've revised my earlier comment. I would be happy to be proven wrong that this is an actual collision, but I'm confident that it is not.

[manuel10cf]

I found that aparently a game of "smart contracts exploit" for learning purposes imported this address. Thanks guys, It was my bad.