38 Mkey/s it's normal for GTX 970?
Possibly. Unfortunately not enough people use (ocl)vanitygen to get a good idea of what performance for various hardware is. I've been asking cryptomining-blog.com to include vanitygen tests in benchmarks for new cards they test, to no avail as of yet.
There's some old measures in
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen_keysearch_rate , which should probably be merged into
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen which also has some measures.
By the way what you guys think about those "special" addresses? you think its have some extra added value in some way? perhaps in the future people will use it in some interesting way ? even though it hurts anonymity I'm pretty sure it's possible to combine it with interesting features like coinjoin/mix and stealth addresses to create some safe&secure wallet or payment service with anonymity...
They're still just vanity addresses. You can generate 1itskok... but so can I. You can generate 1itskokandthensome and it'd take me forever to generate another one, but given enough hardware and/or time, I still could.. so you still couldn't rely on it for exact identification purposes.
A special case of 'vanity' addresses, FirstBits, had some value and utility a long time ago but has largely gone out of vogue (which is a shame, as it's a solid concept that only needs a little bit of expansion for greater utility). FirstBits basically trawled through the blockchain looking for the very first occurrence of 1something..., and returned the matching address. So if you wanted to send Bitcoin to the owner of that very first occurrence of 1something..., you could just enter '1something' and call it a day ( presuming you'd trust the service to be coded right
)
This is different from online databases that work like url shorteners as there's no centralized authority on who owns the first occurrence of '1something'. Recently another
decentralized blockchain identity service - BitAlias - was introduced which might be promising, but is completely unrelated to vanity addresses; it's also rather more generic and could be used for a whole host of other things - but that's for
a different thread [reddit.com search].
All of the above is ignoring the issues with address re-use, etc.
tl;dr: No, I don't really see them having any value beyond exactly what they are: a vanity