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Topic: How to transfer the ownership of a Bitcoin address? (Read 2457 times)

sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 250
So I just recently interested on Bitcoin vanity address, and I generated some cool looking address. And then this idea came out, how can I give or sell people these vanity addresses that I've found?
Is it possible to generate an address and then give the ownership to someone?
Is there any way that I can remove the first private key and then my friend make a new one for himself?

You can do what is called a split key generation of vanity addresses. This way you never have the private key so there is no way you could move the bitcoins yourself and any buyer of your service does not have to worry about whether they can trust you or not. However it is a little complicated. I suggest googling for more information on how it works. I see dannyhamilton has explained how it works above. So read that.


Hey I have read and saw the videos which is related to private key sweeping. I think that instead of unsafe vanity addresses. We could sweep the private key to the person whom needs the ownership right.
Bro please let me know to clearly understand in this.
legendary
Activity: 3682
Merit: 1580
So I just recently interested on Bitcoin vanity address, and I generated some cool looking address. And then this idea came out, how can I give or sell people these vanity addresses that I've found?
Is it possible to generate an address and then give the ownership to someone?
Is there any way that I can remove the first private key and then my friend make a new one for himself?

You can do what is called a split key generation of vanity addresses. This way you never have the private key so there is no way you could move the bitcoins yourself and any buyer of your service does not have to worry about whether they can trust you or not. However it is a little complicated. I suggest googling for more information on how it works. I see dannyhamilton has explained how it works above. So read that.
hero member
Activity: 1204
Merit: 531
Metaverse 👾 Cyberweapons
Selling an address and giving it to a friend are two different contexts for me  x)) Anyway, you already got two methods to do tranfer the ownership. I am adding that I would simply generate an address then send both keys to my friend then delete my own records and my friend would trust me, but if I wanted to sell an address like @apoorvlathey offered, I would use splitting for safety. However, unlike you can read in his thread, I suggest putting the pieces together in a safe environment. In my experience, Vanitygen worked well for address generation.
hero member
Activity: 1568
Merit: 544
I did some searching in the past and maybe this could make it clear.
Some more can be found here https://vanitypool.appspot.com

Quoted from the faq.
This is done by using the properties of the ECDSA algorithm.
Instead of using one private key, two are used.
One is owned by you and never revealed to anyone, the second is the solution to your problem that can be broadcasted publicly.
When you add them together, you get your vanity address.

The trick is, one can generate this vanity address by knowing just your public key
legendary
Activity: 3472
Merit: 4801
Vanity addresses are not safe.  You should not use them, and your friends and customers should not use them. So, selling them or giving them away is not a good idea.

If you, your friends, and your customers choose to use vanity anyhow, then it is a VERY bad idea to give or sell an address that you generated entirely on your own. It is not possible to change the private key of an address since the address is calculated from the private key. If you change the private key, then you change the calculation and therefore you change the resulting address.

As has been mentioned, if this is something that you want to do, then you need to first acquire the public key portion of a split key from your friend or customer, then using that public split key you can start generating a split key vanity address.  When you find one, you give them your piece of the private key portion of the split key that you find and they merge that with the private key portion of their split key.  Since you don't know their private key, you don't know the private key to the vanity address.  Since ONLY they have both private keys (yours and theirs), nobody else can calculate the final private key.
legendary
Activity: 3010
Merit: 1028
Leading Crypto Sports Betting & Casino Platform
generating an address and just give your client the whole privkey is just a bad idea because if problem happening,you'll take the responsibility of the address even you didn't touch it and your client will accuse you

the only method which is proven safe for both client and the seller is
splitting key will make you only having half of the whole privkey and your client will having the rest of privkey so it's definitely the safest method until now
HCP
legendary
Activity: 2086
Merit: 4361
So I just recently interested on Bitcoin vanity address, and I generated some cool looking address. And then this idea came out, how can I give or sell people these vanity addresses that I've found?
Is it possible to generate an address and then give the ownership to someone?
Is there any way that I can remove the first private key and then my friend make a new one for himself?
The problem is you can't really sell an account you've already generated as "safe", as you have seen the private key... any account where the number of people who have access to the private key > 1 can not be guaranteed to be secure. Much the same way any "secret" that is known by more than 1 person is not a secret. Unless the person trusts you implicitly, they should not consider buying one of these addresses from you.

However, if you were to start doing "Split Key" account generation as used by other Vanity Address generator services, then they are "safe" (assuming the recipient follows best practice and runs the private key generation on their own hardware and doesn't do something dumb like use a website to calculate the keys) and should be able to be used without issue. (Ignoring other Vanity Address issues)

legendary
Activity: 1218
Merit: 1007
So I just recently interested on Bitcoin vanity address, and I generated some cool looking address. And then this idea came out, how can I give or sell people these vanity addresses that I've found?
Is it possible to generate an address and then give the ownership to someone?
Is there any way that I can remove the first private key and then my friend make a new one for himself?
I think you can basically generate an address and give it to them and give them ownership based off of giving them both the public and private key to the wallet, however as it has been mentioned there is no guarantee that you'll delete your records of the private key and this does require a ton of trust on the buyer/receiver's part. As for removing the private key and letting your friend generate a new one, I have no idea if that's a thing to be honest.
legendary
Activity: 1470
Merit: 1001
Use Coinbase Account almosanywhere with Shift card
Depends a lot on trust. if you give out a privet key they can add it a their wallet.  but no way to tell that you removed the key from your wallet.
legendary
Activity: 1022
Merit: 1003
𝓗𝓞𝓓𝓛
So I just recently interested on Bitcoin vanity address, and I generated some cool looking address. And then this idea came out, how can I give or sell people these vanity addresses that I've found?
Is it possible to generate an address and then give the ownership to someone?
Is there any way that I can remove the first private key and then my friend make a new one for himself?


Because I've found the answer, I'm locking this thread to avoid spam posts.
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