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Topic: Do Vanity Address Generators hurt bitcoin? (Read 2532 times)

hero member
Activity: 854
Merit: 503
|| Web developer ||
January 04, 2015, 12:03:21 PM
#50
before generate all bitcoin adresses in one 1000 years you can mine all bitcoin+altcoins with that power in 0.0001 seconde
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1004
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
January 04, 2015, 11:54:02 AM
#49
Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision,
Well, there are still ~2^256 possible private keys, or 2^96 private keys per address(according to the forum), anyone attempting this better have a whole galaxy of those Superman data crystals, in addition to a quantum computer + time machine.

correct me if I'm wrong but that doesn't mean there's necessarily 2^96 private keys available for any given address, it's just an average based on 2^256 divided by 2^160.

 anyway this number 2^96 isn't useful since there's no way to know which is the set of 2^96.  brute force by generating private keys would require searching all 2^256.  brute forcing by generating addresses would require 2^160 tries... and brute forcing the ECDSA based on a known public key would require 2^128 operations.
legendary
Activity: 1008
Merit: 1000
January 04, 2015, 04:11:06 AM
#48
What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.
Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.

Its the same problem, breaking a specific address is impossible with current equipment and in the foreseeable future.

If you're interested, you might try breaking 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr for a start.
legendary
Activity: 1862
Merit: 1011
Reverse engineer from time to time
January 04, 2015, 01:47:07 AM
#47
Quite right, 2 days and i generated ~50 million addresses using a single machine (still haven't imported them) now, with 1000 machines that would be 25 billion addresses a day, 10k computers would make that 250 billion address a day. 250 000 000 000 is still very minute in regard tthe total  ? 2^96 , but we must always remember that number is a theoretical limit. there is no guarantee that if we  could, we would end up with the exact number or anything remotely in the range. As the number passes a certain mark , it becomes more likely that a collision will occur. And the more we keep going the higher the frequency of collisions because address generation is not a straight line.

Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision, but i think that the exaggeration of  terms needs to stop. We are talking about general purpose CPUs and trying to use their capabilities as a metric to measure what we can do, which is wrong because maybe soon, someone is going to go for that Vanity ASIC which as you know has the potential to really change the game by massive magnitudes.
That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.

I just tried out my pc a few seconds. How many minutes does it take to generate 1 GB of valid addresses? And if i import them, how big should i expect my wallet file to be? I have a free 4 TB drive and would like to test this out.

4 TB ~= 4,000,000,000,000 Byte = 32,000,000,000,000 Bit. If you only store the addresses (thus, know which ones you've generated in a reasonable amount of time) and there are 2^160 possible addresses: 32,000,000,000,000 / 160 = 200,000,000,000 Addresses. Not that much.
Well, there are still ~2^256 possible private keys, or 2^96 private keys per address(according to the forum), anyone attempting this better have a whole galaxy of those Superman data crystals, in addition to a quantum computer + time machine.
hero member
Activity: 686
Merit: 500
A pumpkin mines 27 hours a night
January 03, 2015, 09:22:10 PM
#46
Quite right, 2 days and i generated ~50 million addresses using a single machine (still haven't imported them) now, with 1000 machines that would be 25 billion addresses a day, 10k computers would make that 250 billion address a day. 250 000 000 000 is still very minute in regard tthe total  ? 2^96 , but we must always remember that number is a theoretical limit. there is no guarantee that if we  could, we would end up with the exact number or anything remotely in the range. As the number passes a certain mark , it becomes more likely that a collision will occur. And the more we keep going the higher the frequency of collisions because address generation is not a straight line.

Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision, but i think that the exaggeration of  terms needs to stop. We are talking about general purpose CPUs and trying to use their capabilities as a metric to measure what we can do, which is wrong because maybe soon, someone is going to go for that Vanity ASIC which as you know has the potential to really change the game by massive magnitudes.
That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.

I just tried out my pc a few seconds. How many minutes does it take to generate 1 GB of valid addresses? And if i import them, how big should i expect my wallet file to be? I have a free 4 TB drive and would like to test this out.

4 TB ~= 4,000,000,000,000 Byte = 32,000,000,000,000 Bit. If you only store the addresses (thus, know which ones you've generated in a reasonable amount of time) and there are 2^160 possible addresses: 32,000,000,000,000 / 160 = 200,000,000,000 Addresses. Not that much.
hero member
Activity: 602
Merit: 501
January 03, 2015, 09:16:10 PM
#45
Quite right, 2 days and i generated ~50 million addresses using a single machine (still haven't imported them) now, with 1000 machines that would be 25 billion addresses a day, 10k computers would make that 250 billion address a day. 250 000 000 000 is still very minute in regard tthe total  ? 2^96 , but we must always remember that number is a theoretical limit. there is no guarantee that if we  could, we would end up with the exact number or anything remotely in the range. As the number passes a certain mark , it becomes more likely that a collision will occur. And the more we keep going the higher the frequency of collisions because address generation is not a straight line.

Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision, but i think that the exaggeration of  terms needs to stop. We are talking about general purpose CPUs and trying to use their capabilities as a metric to measure what we can do, which is wrong because maybe soon, someone is going to go for that Vanity ASIC which as you know has the potential to really change the game by massive magnitudes.
That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.

I just tried out my pc a few seconds. How many minutes does it take to generate 1 GB of valid addresses? And if i import them, how big should i expect my wallet file to be? I have a free 4 TB drive and would like to test this out.
hero member
Activity: 686
Merit: 500
A pumpkin mines 27 hours a night
January 03, 2015, 09:08:46 PM
#44
Back in the 70's they thought two digits for the Year field is all anyone needed. Use 2 bytes instead of 4 and save a ton of memory. When Y2K came around, people panicked.

The Unix doomsday is Jan 19, 2038, when Unix time rolls over to 00000000000000.  Someone decided that a double precision data type is all they needed (8 bytes) for Unix time. When 2038 comes around, everyone will be scrambling again.

FAT file system allowed for storage devices up to 4GB. Who's ever going to use for than 4GB? That's an unheard of amount of memory back in 1980 when 10MB hard drives cost $2000 and floppy disks were the norm.

Oh wait, 4GB isn't enough. Let's make FAT32 with a limit of 2TB.  No one will ever use 2TB on a home computer.

Oh no! 2TB isn't that much after all. Let's go to NTFS.  What's the limit on NTFS? I haven't had time to look it up.

Mistakes after mistakes have been made and will continue to be made. Although it seems that Bitcoin addresses are nearly infinite, there still is a limit. While that limit cannot be reasonably achieved right now, that may change in the future.


Well, you can extrapolate the increase of hashing power or power used to calculate Bitcoin addresses (effectively hashing, yeah) pretty easily and more or less reliably, though. The limits of those file systems were also due to certain limitations that made sense at that time.
legendary
Activity: 1862
Merit: 1011
Reverse engineer from time to time
January 03, 2015, 09:07:44 PM
#43
Quite right, 2 days and i generated ~50 million addresses using a single machine (still haven't imported them) now, with 1000 machines that would be 25 billion addresses a day, 10k computers would make that 250 billion address a day. 250 000 000 000 is still very minute in regard tthe total  ? 2^96 , but we must always remember that number is a theoretical limit. there is no guarantee that if we  could, we would end up with the exact number or anything remotely in the range. As the number passes a certain mark , it becomes more likely that a collision will occur. And the more we keep going the higher the frequency of collisions because address generation is not a straight line.

Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision, but i think that the exaggeration of  terms needs to stop. We are talking about general purpose CPUs and trying to use their capabilities as a metric to measure what we can do, which is wrong because maybe soon, someone is going to go for that Vanity ASIC which as you know has the potential to really change the game by massive magnitudes.
That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.
hero member
Activity: 602
Merit: 501
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1004
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
January 03, 2015, 09:02:39 PM
#41
  2^96 

Where did you get 2^96 from?
legendary
Activity: 882
Merit: 1000
January 03, 2015, 08:57:32 PM
#40
Quite right, 2 days and i generated ~50 million addresses using a single machine (still haven't imported them) now, with 1000 machines that would be 25 billion addresses a day, 10k computers would make that 250 billion address a day. 250 000 000 000 is still very minute in regard tthe total  ? 2^96 , but we must always remember that number is a theoretical limit. there is no guarantee that if we  could, we would end up with the exact number or anything remotely in the range. As the number passes a certain mark , it becomes more likely that a collision will occur. And the more we keep going the higher the frequency of collisions because address generation is not a straight line.

Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision, but i think that the exaggeration of  terms needs to stop. We are talking about general purpose CPUs and trying to use their capabilities as a metric to measure what we can do, which is wrong because maybe soon, someone is going to go for that Vanity ASIC which as you know has the potential to really change the game by massive magnitudes.
legendary
Activity: 1302
Merit: 1004
Core dev leaves me neg feedback #abuse #political
January 03, 2015, 08:54:39 PM
#39
Back in the 70's they thought two digits for the Year field is all anyone needed. Use 2 bytes instead of 4 and save a ton of memory. When Y2K came around, people panicked.

The Unix doomsday is Jan 19, 2038, when Unix time rolls over to 00000000000000.  Someone decided that a double precision data type is all they needed (8 bytes) for Unix time. When 2038 comes around, everyone will be scrambling again.

FAT file system allowed for storage devices up to 4GB. Who's ever going to use for than 4GB? That's an unheard of amount of memory back in 1980 when 10MB hard drives cost $2000 and floppy disks were the norm.

Oh wait, 4GB isn't enough. Let's make FAT32 with a limit of 2TB.  No one will ever use 2TB on a home computer.

Oh no! 2TB isn't that much after all. Let's go to NTFS.  What's the limit on NTFS? I haven't had time to look it up.

Mistakes after mistakes have been made and will continue to be made. Although it seems that Bitcoin addresses are nearly infinite, there still is a limit. While that limit cannot be reasonably achieved right now, that may change in the future.


Perhaps, but do you realize that if the hashpower of the entire bitcoin network were spent on creating addresses , it would take over 21 trillion years to generate 2^128 addresses?
member
Activity: 117
Merit: 10
January 03, 2015, 08:17:26 PM
#38
Back in the 70's they thought two digits for the Year field is all anyone needed. Use 2 bytes instead of 4 and save a ton of memory. When Y2K came around, people panicked.

The Unix doomsday is Jan 19, 2038, when Unix time rolls over to 00000000000000.  Someone decided that a double precision data type is all they needed (8 bytes) for Unix time. When 2038 comes around, everyone will be scrambling again.

FAT file system allowed for storage devices up to 4GB. Who's ever going to use for than 4GB? That's an unheard of amount of memory back in 1980 when 10MB hard drives cost $2000 and floppy disks were the norm.

Oh wait, 4GB isn't enough. Let's make FAT32 with a limit of 2TB.  No one will ever use 2TB on a home computer.

Oh no! 2TB isn't that much after all. Let's go to NTFS.  What's the limit on NTFS? I haven't had time to look it up.

Mistakes after mistakes have been made and will continue to be made. Although it seems that Bitcoin addresses are nearly infinite, there still is a limit. While that limit cannot be reasonably achieved right now, that may change in the future.
tss
hero member
Activity: 742
Merit: 500
January 03, 2015, 07:19:00 PM
#37
regular address generators also produce tons of unused addresses except much quicker.
full member
Activity: 196
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Hi
January 03, 2015, 04:17:04 PM
#36
What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.
Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.
No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

Well, effectively he is right, you could just tell your vanity-generator (or whatnot) to look for that address's private key, but it would effectively be futile since the chances are astronomically low of succeeding (like, really low... Not even worth trying)
With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...
If current ASIC technology were to be modified slightly then it would be possible to check trillions of private keys every second for only a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment. The chances of finding a specific private key to a btc address are still very small
donator
Activity: 1616
Merit: 1003
January 03, 2015, 02:56:56 PM
#35
With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...

Instead of posting the silly picture of the star again, here is a link to a Bruce Schneier article about how a supernova has only enough energy to theoretically cycle through a 219-bit counter (and no energy left to do any additional computation).

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html
legendary
Activity: 2198
Merit: 1049
January 03, 2015, 02:55:39 PM
#34
What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

+1 for a creative way to answer something asked for the 157,248th time.

off-topic: +1 to see U back again.

Most of the people thought u were the best poster of 2014 => https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/who-is-the-best-poster-of-2014-907916

Where were u have been for so long ?
donator
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1079
Gerald Davis
January 03, 2015, 02:42:11 PM
#33
What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

+1 for a creative way to answer something asked for the 157,248th time.
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
Trust me!
January 03, 2015, 02:39:02 PM
#32
What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.
Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.
No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

Well, effectively he is right, you could just tell your vanity-generator (or whatnot) to look for that address's private key, but it would effectively be futile since the chances are astronomically low of succeeding (like, really low... Not even worth trying)
With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...

First of all: RAM doesn't help you much with performing SHA256 hashs. 800+ keys/s are nothing.
Imagine there are 100m Addresses in use with bitcoins in them (Which is genereous, as of now). Hell, say there are 1b addresses in use, even! There are 2 ^ 160 possible addresses (1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976). To find the key to one address that is in use, you'd statistically still have to calculate 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655 addresses.
Let's say you want this done in 50 years (finding a collision), you'd have to calculate 926878258073885666034807732569 addresses/s. For 50 years non-stop.
But then again, my calculations may be off...  Tongue
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 250
I'm a Web Developer: HTML, CSS, PHP, JS.
January 03, 2015, 02:06:00 PM
#31
What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.
Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.
No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

Well, effectively he is right, you could just tell your vanity-generator (or whatnot) to look for that address's private key, but it would effectively be futile since the chances are astronomically low of succeeding (like, really low... Not even worth trying)
With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...
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