bitcoin addresses | Bitcointalksearch.org

Gavin Andresen

legendary

Activity: 1652

Merit: 2216

Chief Scientist

Quote from: Hal on January 21, 2011, 06:10:15 PM

Satoshi once suggested that people could hack their client to generate and discard a bunch of random addresses until you got one that started with your initials or even your name if it was short.

I wrote a 'vanity bitcoin address' patch a while ago that lets you do exactly that: https://gist.github.com/614460

I bet finding an address starting 1HAL... wouldn't take more than a few hours. If I recall, it took a day or so to find one with the string 'gavin' in it.

Hal

vip

Activity: 314

Merit: 3853

Satoshi once suggested that people could hack their client to generate and discard a bunch of random addresses until you got one that started with your initials or even your name if it was short. Well, I guess it would have to skip the forbidden letters like 'l'.

Signed, Ha.

Gavin Andresen

legendary

Activity: 1652

Merit: 2216

Chief Scientist

Because the first byte in a bitcoin address is a version number, and "version 0" is encoded as a "1" in the bitcoin address "base58 encoding" (because 0 is too easy to confuse with capital-o).

Trivia: -testnet addresses are version 111 (eleven is my favorite number), and begin with m or n (I haven't actually worked out whether they might begin with another letter, too...).

FreeMoney

legendary

Activity: 1246

Merit: 1015