Out of curiosity: How are serial numbers generated? Hints, Algorithms? [closed]

Answer 1

A GUID ("Globally Unique Identifier") could be an easy way to solve this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Unique_Identifier

Guids contain 16 bytes and are most commonly written in text as a sequence of hexadecimal digits such as:

3F2504E0-4F89-11D3-9A0C-0305E82C3301

And most programming languages should be able to generate a GUID with one of the available libraries.