Topic: Vanity Pool - vanity address generator pool - page 36. (Read 148044 times)

There's more to it than software. The key to success for a business venture like this will be the backend hardware that allows for mass production and fulfilment.

Kudos to ThePiachu but it's not like he invented anything new. The theoretical basis for outsourcing vanity address generation has existed for a while and he just started a project to get the ball rolling. One way or another this will end up as a FLOSS platform so there's not much monetization potential.

Looking forward to the advent of compatible miners.

I dunno, I'm not much of a business person either. But I would imagine some type of stock issuance would be a start. But that would require some kind of incorporation and like you said, probably a huge hindrance to you at this point.

For now, I'm happy to send you some Bitcoins when I have some time to try out the service.

The pool is running on Google App Engine and my Bitcoind runs on Amazon EC2, so my hardware costs are non-existant. As for software, I probably can create some basic solutions easily enough with enough time and put up some bounties for more sophisticated ones.

I'm generally not that much of a business type, so trying to handle possible investments could only hamper this little project for now. What sort of model of investing did you have in mind?

I mean INVEST... like if you've solved this problem, someone needs to be throwing money at you to buy hardware and further develop this proprietary software for a promise in sharing future profits. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see a big demand for this kind of service as Bitcoin awareness spreads.

Donations are always welcome;):

1B98qJ1NT6BNdnGp1fgCshAvWP8i4grdy7

And a new Bitcoin Business model was born. Where do I invest?

Great Idea!

I've implemented a sort of "mining pool" for creating vanity addresses with zero needed trust. As to how it is possible, check out these links:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.901491
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/3853/323

The main pool is running at:
http://vanitypool.appspot.com/

And you might also want to check out:
http://gobittest.appspot.com/VanityAll
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Address_Utility

So, onwards with the explanations:

The idea is, that you can generate a vanity address without even knowing what private key it will actually belong to. One party grabs a random ECDSA keypair and saves the private key for themselves. They later can issue a request for a vanity address to be created, by supplying the public key form that keypair, their desired pattern and so forth. A person takes with looking for the vanity address is required to brute force random ECDSA private keys, get their corresponding public keys, add them to the provided public key, and proceed normally with SHA, RIPEMD and base58 until they receive the desired pattern. Then they give the private key they found to the first person, which adds the two private keys in order to get their vanity address. The best thing about it - the person looking for the solution won't know what the resulting private key is! This means that you can outsource your vanity key generation without needing to trust any third party.

An example (available from gobittest website):
We have a private key:
18E14A7B6A307F426A94F8114701E7C8E774E7F9A47E2C2035DB29A206321725
which maps to public key:
0450863AD64A87AE8A2FE83C1AF1A8403CB53F53E486D8511DAD8A04887E5B23522CD470243453A 299FA9E77237716103ABC11A1DF38855ED6F2EE187E9C582BA6

and say we want to find a pattern "166". One of the solutions takes a form of a private key
B18427B169E86DE681A1A62588E1D02AE4A7E83C1B413849989A76282A7B562F
mapping to public key:
049C95E0949E397FACCECF0FE8EAD247E6FD082717E4A4A876049FB34A9ADED110DFEA2EF691CC4 A1410498F4C312F3A94318CD5B6F0E8E92051064876751C8404

If we add the two public keys (like the person looking for the solution would do), we get a public key:
0436970CE32E14DC06AC50217CDCF53E628B32810707080D6848D9C8D4BE9FE461E100E705CCA98 54436A1283210CCEFBB6B16CB9A86B009488922A8F302A27487
which is equivalent to this address:
166ev9JXn2rFqiPSQAwM7qJYpNL1JrNf3h

If we add the two private keys (like the person requesting the address would), we get:
CA65722CD418ED28EC369E36CFE3B7F3CC1CD035BFBF6469CE759FCA30AD6D54
which maps to the same public key as the sum of the public keys, and thus - to the same address.

Since this is a model that requires basically no trust from any party, I've decided to create this "Vanity Pool" to enable people to easily outsource their vanity address creation, as well as enable people wanting to earn some Bitcoins to use their machines for something different from traditional mining.

The main problem currently, is that there is no software to support mining for such split addresses, and combining them offline. If someone wants to commit to creating such a software, it would be great!

For the time being, the website is up for testing only on testnet. From that I can see there are still some bugs in the system, but it should work as expected.

Any comments, suggestions?

EDIT 1:
I've created a simple split vanity miner software in Google Go (if you're wondering why I used this weird language - I've been developing Bitcoin-related apps in it for a year for my master thesis). The source code and a Mac executable is available here:
https://github.com/ThePiachu/Split-Vanity-Miner-Golang
It is quite slow, checking a couple hundred addresses on my old Macbook Pro, but it can solve some reasonably short patterns. The software is streamlined for the vanity pool, you only need to change the given testnet Bitcoin address to yours and it will do most of the work. It fetches work only during the start, so keep that in mind if you want to run it for longer.

EDIT 2:
Main Net version is up.

EDIT 3:
If you want to mine at this pool, please use oclvanityminer created by samr7 (https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/vanitygen-vanity-bitcoin-address-generatorminer-v022-25804).

Also, if you are interested, there is a new bounty for split-key vanity address management software:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bounty-cancelled-6btc-split-key-vanity-address-management-software-117050