Sep 3, 2018 · 1 min read
No. It means that it COULD take longer than the age of the universe (and even that it’s expected to be so), but if you’re “randomly” choosing items from a set, this means that choosing any item on such set has the same probability as any other, so it also could take you (though with much less probability) less than 3 attempts until you find one that isn’t empty.
Maybe the bitcoin protocol actually guarantees that the drawer is in fact empty, but that’s not what you wrote.
