Uncompressed keys have public keys about twice the size of compressed ones and this means that when you use vanitygen produced addresses you end up paying more in transaction fees, causing more increase in blockchain size, etc.
I have modified my own copy of vanitygen to produce compressed keys...
Please upload your version of vanitygen. We will all be grateful for it. Put a disclaimer on your version if you don't like support or whatever, I am sure it will work just fine as is if the only modification was making it produce compressed keys.
AFAICT, he never did. I dug around in the vanitygen code a bit and got it to spit out compressed addresses without too much difficulty. I've put my fork up here:
https://github.com/salfter/vanitygen
As an added bonus, it'll generate Litecoin vanity addresses (compressed or uncompressed). Since I'm not sure if script addresses can be compressed, I made script addresses and compressed addresses mutually exclusive. Use something like this to get a compressed Bitcoin address:
To get a compressed Litecoin vanity address, use something like this:
I've checked the generated addresses against bitaddress.org and liteaddress.org; it looks like it's doing what it should.
How do I compile that? or are there windows binaries already available?