Is it possible to run vanitygen across a few boxes (in a "cluster mode") to speed up address generation?
It's a lot like mining: if you double your processing power, you'll find twice as many blocks/addresses.
Vanitygen searches at random, so if you were to start it on 10 different computers, they all search different addresses.
You can look at it as trying to roll a 6 on a dice. If you throw 2 dice at once, chances you hit it go up! If you throw 20 dice, it becomes very likely to hit it very fast.
I got your point, though I didn't mean that. It seems valid but I'm still not sure if simply running many instances of vanitygen in search of a random address is not worse (time wise) than running only one instance in search of just one address with a
given prefix (in both cases) using that much processing power. Indeed, the program itself may be built in such a way that it won't make any difference, but can it still be made different if programmed specifically for massively-parallel execution?
I'm not very versed in Bitcoin technology internals, so I pretty much don't know and don't claim anything (just in case)
