The Base58 Encoding of a public key hash outputs: "A set of 58 alphanumeric symbols consisting of easily distinguished uppercase and lowercase letters (0OIl are not used)"
This set is a fixed string of 34 characters.
That is to say, "A bit coin wallet's address is 34 characters, each character being one from a possible set of 58"
So the total possible addresses is 58^34 which is just slightly less than 2^40.
I understand that the hash space is 2^160, but the final result is much smaller at 2^40. What am I missing?
Edit: I made a simple math mistake reducing 58^34 to a power of two by adding not multiplying the exponents... The bitcoin address is sufficient to contain the 2^160 possible hashes: 58^34 is 904 octodecillion (60 decimal digits), and 2^160 is 1 quindecillion (49 decimal digits)... the larger number accounts for the version byte and checksum.
