Do Vanity Address Generators hurt bitcoin? - page 2.

ensurance982

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Quote from: needFREElunch on January 03, 2015, 12:58:52 PM

Quote from: michaeladair on January 03, 2015, 12:42:27 AM

Quote from: Fernandez on January 03, 2015, 12:37:30 AM

Quote from: Flashman on January 02, 2015, 10:52:45 PM

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)

needFREElunch

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Hi

Quote from: michaeladair on January 03, 2015, 12:42:27 AM

Quote from: Fernandez on January 03, 2015, 12:37:30 AM

Quote from: Flashman on January 02, 2015, 10:52:45 PM

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).

jonald_fyookball

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I have no proof whatsoever, I just thought I heard something about there being a risk.
I guess if they are just hashing and throwing away everything that's not the chosen vanity
its cool, but i thought it was more complicated than that.

ensurance982

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Quote from: jonald_fyookball on January 03, 2015, 12:22:29 PM

Yes but what no one mentioned so far is that vanity addresses may not be
nearly as random or collision resistant as normal addresses. For that
reason, some people don't advocate them.

They don't hurt Bitcoin, but I doubt they are the highest security
addresses.

Well, do you've got any proof of that? I mean, they're merely the result of a hashing function (applied multiple times) to an input that may or may not be random. There would have to be a connection between addresses with certain characteristics (preferred in vanity addresses) and the input of the hashing function.

Elwar

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Quote from: michaeladair on January 03, 2015, 12:03:59 PM

Quote from: LOBSTER on January 03, 2015, 11:39:12 AM

Also they are not wasting these addresses. Everyone else can generate the same address again (It's indeed unlikely, but possible).

Does it not bug you at all that someone can generate the same address as another person. However unlikely it is, it's still possible.

VanityGen generates random numbers. These all already exist.

VanityGen does not do anything.

You need to send bitcoin to an address for that address to be put into use on the blockchain.

You could generate a billion addresses per second, they would not go onto the blockchain.

jonald_fyookball

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Yes but what no one mentioned so far is that vanity addresses may not be
nearly as random or collision resistant as normal addresses. For that
reason, some people don't advocate them.

They don't hurt Bitcoin, but I doubt they are the highest security
addresses.

ensurance982

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What people don't seem to get is that those addresses are not being 'registered' anywhere or taken out of the pool free for people to take.

If you generate a new address, you just pick a random private key and see which address this key controls (easily computable), which is then your Bitcoin address. (The opposite isn't possible, at least there is no known method as of now) This is one of the things that make Bitcoin safe.

michaeladair

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Quote from: LOBSTER on January 03, 2015, 11:39:12 AM

Also they are not wasting these addresses. Everyone else can generate the same address again (It's indeed unlikely, but possible).

Does it not bug you at all that someone can generate the same address as another person. However unlikely it is, it's still possible.

LOBSTER

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Also they are not wasting these addresses. Everyone else can generate the same address again (It's indeed unlikely, but possible).

Flashman

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Hodl!

A random address collision is a bit more likely than you'd think, but given the size of the address range, still bloody unlikely. To get a handle on that, see... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

twister

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Quote from: Remember remember the 5th of November on January 02, 2015, 11:10:58 PM

To generate a used address, unless due to a glitch, you'd need a dyson sphere, a young star, negative energy and the knowledge of how to open a wormhole for the purpose of time-traveling to the future.

So this means it can be done. Grin

jasemoney

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Forget-about-it

following the offtopic discussion: it'd be as lucky as me typing "setgenerate true 1" in my wallet and mining a block in 5-10 minutes today. actually me mining that block in a few minutes is much much more likely than finding a collision to a known rich address or even a known address. I think I read theres been 1 known collision (seperate priv keys control same address) so far, and it was to an unused address.

eleuthria

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Quote from: michaeladair on January 03, 2015, 12:42:27 AM

Quote from: Fernandez on January 03, 2015, 12:37:30 AM

Quote from: Flashman on January 02, 2015, 10:52:45 PM

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.

Targeting a specific address wouldn't matter. The odds are so astronomically high that I can't even think of a statistical analogy. Probably something along the lines of winning the powerball lottery hundreds of times, in a row, with only a single ticket for each lottery.

Yes, it can happen. But at some point you have to just accept that it won't ever happen in the lifetime of the universe, unless a flaw is discovered that allows somebody to reverse the process of creating an asymmetrical key pair.

Remember remember the 5th of November

legendary

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Reverse engineer from time to time

Quote from: michaeladair on January 03, 2015, 12:42:27 AM

Quote from: Fernandez on January 03, 2015, 12:37:30 AM

Quote from: Flashman on January 02, 2015, 10:52:45 PM

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.

The exchange would at some point use another address. I think you are still not getting the billion years concept.

michaeladair

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Quote from: Fernandez on January 03, 2015, 12:37:30 AM

Quote from: Flashman on January 02, 2015, 10:52:45 PM

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.

Fernandez

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Quote from: Flashman on January 02, 2015, 10:52:45 PM

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.

jasemoney

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Forget-about-it

Hello, the addresses search function of vanity gen may be running a dozen million keys a second but they are not being stored by the program. it outputs ones relevant to your search prefix only. as user remember remember the 5th pointed out theres an absurd amount of possible private keys, but even if your computer tripped over one the vanity gen program is not searching for collisions while also searching for your prefix, so you would never know. You could try using vanity gen to brute force a well known address but it only takes prefix sizes for a certain length nowhere near the size of a bitcoin public address. and by the time the heat death of the universe passed you by you might still not have been able to crack into those coins Wink

monsanto

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..like bright metal on a sullen ground.

No, that's the whole point behind bitcoin's operation as I understand it. That's how you can make offline addresses because the solution space is so large that it is for all practical purposes impossible to generate an address that has already been generated before. Which also, as I understand it, would be the equivalent to hacking your account, which can only happen if you had poor entropy by using a bad brain wallet password or bad random number generator, etc.

Flashman

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Hodl!

Using the basic quantitative appreciation system of the human brain "one, two, three, many, lots" we can see that the number of addresses is "lots", since the total MIPS possible for the top 500 is "lots" then if we used all those to brute force all the addresses, then we'd have it done in no time, maybe between lunch and dinner. Unless you were hungry, then it would seem longer.

*trollface*

ruletheworld

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If you want the same explanation in a video format, here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHVKk7DHk
Yes, the numbers are huge.

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