Topic: Vanitygen: Vanity bitcoin address generator/miner [v0.22] - page 73. (Read 1153383 times)

It's a pity there is no 'real' pool that rewards the common effort.
Most of the third party generation is a rat race where the first find is rewarded.

This could relative easy be setup in a three stage approach.

1 - Client delivers a public key and a wanted prefix to the pool.

2 - Pool adds or multiplies their own private key and generates a new public key.

3 - Workers are now hashing with this new pool public key, and results are send back to the pool.
(intermediate results to generate shares are needed here)

2 - Pool combines his private key with the found private key, provides proof of work to client and collects reward.

1 - Clients takes the combined private key, combines it with it's own private key.

All miners can now be payed by share ratio.

I will give it a try as well. 6 symbols takes ~5 hours (~6 /w -S) for a 50% chance to find one on my GPU. I can let it run in safe mode over night. If you dont want to post the pubkey publicly you can use my PGP key (see profile) to encrypt it.

I think this is a great idea. I would gladly help someone get one but don't want to make the guarantee of finding it which is nice about the pool as many people can search on and off.

Most vanity services have shut down, period, because there just isn't enough interest in it or the interest that's there is for vanities so difficult to generate (on average) that they'd have to charge fairly high fees up front which discourages people from requesting those vanities.
While a vanity pool that would work similar to Bitcoin mining pools might bring about a change in that, the lack of interest makes that a lot of effort in development that doesn't seem likely to pay off.  Couple that with all the efforts to discourage vanity addresses (not sure if it was this thread where somebody mentioned a service that would involve vanity addresses as part of an identification scheme, but... that's a bad idea), or even discourage the use of addresses at all (the whole "users should never have to see an address" mantra), and the waning popularity is easily explained.


Odds are that vanitypool ( https://vanitypool.appspot.com ) is one of the few still reliably operational.
Looks like vanityamp finally disappeared (too bad, was a slick site)
http://vircurvault.com/order/bitcoin/vanity/custom is also still up, but pricing is fairly high (1-4 characters at BTC0.05 means you'd better generate that yourself).
No idea if gadman2 ( https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/free-split-key-vanity-addresses-270180 ) or devthedev ( https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/bitcoin-vanity-addresses-100-vanities-generated-347591 ) still offer their services.

I think there were a few other people offering to generate vanity addresses on a one-off basis.  Heck, you could post your public key part here along with the desired vanity, see if anybody's interested in trying to generate it, and work out the details of payment (escrow etc.) between the two of you

Thanks TheRealSteve for your explanation. In the meantime, I searched everywhere for split-key vanity address generation services but what I noticed is most of the services are abandoned! Also I found this site (bitcoinvanitygen.com) but it doesn't offer split-key generation! Do you know any of the active services ? Because I want to have a 6 character vanity too

Edit: Whoops! Just now I noticed Velkro's trust rating and figured out why he was asking me to try out his site! 

For technical details, see this post: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.901491
For an overly simplified explanation: you generate a private/public key pair and give the person generating the vanity address the public key.  They pass that public key to vanitygen and ask it to find a private key which combined with that public key gives the vanity address.  However, that combination does not yield the correct private key for that vanity address, for that they would have to combine the private key with your private key (which, obviously, you shouldn't give them).  Once you receive their private key, you combine it with your private key, and the result is the private key for the vanity address.

So no, there's no exploit possible there in terms of getting the private key to the vanity address.

As for using bitaddress.org to combine split keys, that's up to the end-user whether or not to trust a third party service for that portion of the procedure.  The site can be downloaded and used offline for the (rightfully) paranoid.  There's also the keyconv utility that's part of vanitygen that'll combine two private keys for this sort of purpose.

Of course 'the best way' is to do it yourself, but most people don't have quite as much GPU computing power as some of the services or places like vanitypool

Can you please explain how the split key actually works ? I have used vanitygen personally and it pretty much shows me both the keys. This is the safest way I guess

Now suppose, Mr. Noob asks Mr.A to generate a vanity address for him and Mr. A secretly uses vanitygen and gives Mr. Noob only the address, telling that he used split key vanity address generation and requests him to find the private key via bitaddress.org ! So isn't this a downside of using any websites even with split key feature? Or is there any way Mr. Noob can get a glimpse of the whole process of randomness generation ?

P.S. The best way IMO to generate a vanity address is to use vanitygen on a PC which remains offline all the time!

Any vanity address generation site worth looking at will use split key vanity address generation, in which they can generate the vanity address but not know the private key.  Any site that doesn't use this shouldn't be trusted.  Also any site that does use it, but provides your half of the key themselves, should not be trusted.  Search the web for 'split key vanity' for more information.

How can I rely on you that you will not be saving it's private key ? I intend to save all my fortune cookies in one of my vanity addresses. Hence, security is the most concerned factor in this case

Thats pretty much impossible, 6 characters vanity address is quite easy because site im using offering it for free, but more than that is quite expensive.

Correct.  lowercase letter "L", uppercase letter "i", uppercase letter "O" and the number zero are all disallowed in Bitcoin's version of base58.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Base58Check_encoding#Background

The details of elliptic curve cryptography and RIPEMD160 are pretty complex - wikipedia should have plenty of details.  The issue is largely that Bitcoin mining ASICs do one thing and one thing only: mine Bitcoin.  The technical process in that is completely incompatible with vanity address generation or pretty much any other task you can think of.  They can't even be used as a fast way to generate SHA256 hashes for a given input as they are input-limited, perform the hashing process twice, and even then only partially (as they only care if the resulting hash is 'low enough' they don't have to go through all rounds).  Hit up your choice of search engine with "asic vanity" for quite a bit of discussion, but the tl;dr is that you can't use them for accelerating vanity address generation.  GPUs and optimized code are your best bet, short of trying your hand at programming an FPGA (not sure how much of a gain you'd get from that for the cost involved)

@Kangaderoo, yes, that's why I thought maybe ASIC will help to speed up the process and lower the ETA but since you said ECSDA and RIMD hashing protocols are being used for finding an address, can you please elaborate on how those protocols work technically?

@shorena thanks for your correction ... Because uppercase "i" and lowercase "l" looks same and may be confused upon, is this the reason why base58 excluded this ? Then zero and uppercase "o" must be excluded too ! Right ??

Nope its impossible. There is no "I" in base58 as bitcoin uses it. 1inDiaNaCoiNBTC would be possible but as you say take several million years or an amount of luck that would better be spend on a lottery or two.

Short answer is no.
The ASIC based miners only support the SHA and or Scrypt algorithms.

But 80% of the processing time for vanitycoins is related to the ECSDA calculations,
and there is also a RIMD hashing involved. These last two protocols are not supported by the ASIC's.

You would need GPU hashing for this one, and looking at the length of your prefix.... a lot of time.
each char is roughly a multiple of 60;  in your case you might need to run the program for
60^14/hashingspeed seconds.
Even when hashing 10GH/s that would take 25 million years.... give or take...

Can I generate a vanity address with my spare Antminer S3+ ? Because I want an address like this :

"1InDiaNaCoINBTC...."

A single GTX 970 is enough for that.


A little longer in save mode.

Hi,you can use that "feature" in whatever going on your mind, the main idea here is that you can give a "face" to the non good looking bitcoin addresses and let them look a little bit more humane readable,it can be good in terms of UX/UI or if you want to have a "unique" address that will help people know who you are/what is your bitcoin "identity" ,you can check that service that i am trying to develop and that include some "vanity address" feature's : https://www.riders.io/

I have also question for the people here,i tried to generate an address with 6 patterns (case sensitive) with my 9600GT card,it took almost 2 weeks lol,how much GPU power i need in order to lower that time for something like 4-5 hours? how much graphics cards?
Tnx!

I've read about some uses for vanitygen (e.g., vanity address creation and voting address creation) but am curiously wondering what else are you guys using it for???

Thanks for that tip. I deleted the two that existed and it started to work. Much easier than what I was expecting. Went from the 900 Kkeys to the 15-17 Mkeys I was getting for the pool.

Appreciate it greatly.

Did you delete the .oclbin file first? I would guess that you have to compile the kernel for either 32 or 64 bit.