..what really makes me mad about this address is not that there are already coins being sent to it, which now are unrecoverable.
This address is the address for the firstbits "1bitcoin", which would have been an awesome address in my wallet, on the phone, on my business card! :-)
Ente
Topic: 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend - page 2. (Read 4223 times)
Thanks. That explains it.
The address does not correspond to an actual ECDSA public key. Remember than an address is just a hash of an ECSDA public key, which means the address can look like anything. So there's nothing stopping me from creating the address 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE with the appropriate checksum to make it look like a valid address, but I don't have the public-private keypair needed to spend money sent to that address.
In otherwords, vanity gen creates public/private keypairs and turns them into addresses looking for one that has your target word/phrase in it. The output is a real address for which you have the private key and can spend the money. In this case, though, the person can just make the address directly, but has no idea if there is a public/private keypair associated with it, and certainly doesn't have it. The checksum at the end guarantees the client sees it as valid, but no one will ever be able to provide a public key to the network that hashes to that, and thus any coins sent there will be unrecoverable.
In otherwords, vanity gen creates public/private keypairs and turns them into addresses looking for one that has your target word/phrase in it. The output is a real address for which you have the private key and can spend the money. In this case, though, the person can just make the address directly, but has no idea if there is a public/private keypair associated with it, and certainly doesn't have it. The checksum at the end guarantees the client sees it as valid, but no one will ever be able to provide a public key to the network that hashes to that, and thus any coins sent there will be unrecoverable.
Or maybe no one has the private key for this address.
NEVERMIND - I understand now this is just a bogus (but honest) address which states exactly what will happen if you send any Bitcoins to it.
I have been playing around with vanity address generation. For fun I ran http://firstbits.com/1bitcoin thinking to myself that surely someone had already claimed that address (if not I was going to get it). What I got really shocked me:
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE
I find this amazing and a bit concerning.
I was very concerned because my first thought was that someone has enough hashing power to almost reproduce an entire public key address.
I am less concerned now that I figure the search was some sort of regular expression of English words.
Still, I wonder how long this took and how much computational power was used.
This also leads to my main question: assuming someone could reproduce an entire public key address would they be able to steal the BTC from the original account with that same public key address?
Maybe the owner of this address can tell us how long this took and how they did it.
I have been playing around with vanity address generation. For fun I ran http://firstbits.com/1bitcoin thinking to myself that surely someone had already claimed that address (if not I was going to get it). What I got really shocked me:
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE
I find this amazing and a bit concerning.
I was very concerned because my first thought was that someone has enough hashing power to almost reproduce an entire public key address.
I am less concerned now that I figure the search was some sort of regular expression of English words.
Still, I wonder how long this took and how much computational power was used.
This also leads to my main question: assuming someone could reproduce an entire public key address would they be able to steal the BTC from the original account with that same public key address?
Maybe the owner of this address can tell us how long this took and how they did it.
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