Bitcoin Forum

I have a question regarding bitcoin wallets and how they are generated.

For instance I stuck a lotto getting this address ( 1PAYMEJeKHRPXd9R5VSGXrLLGkyVDfshnU - dont send btc here I wont send it back haha ) on a paperwallet.

I understand there are vanity addresses such as ( 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE ). This is intriguing because did satoshi premine every address?

Is there a node that keeps generating them? Is there a blockchain for them that says 'hey this one is used already'

How come you never recreate an address that was once used or full? (I know bitcoin addresses can collide and 2 people will have access to it)

My question is in regards to how many wallets there are or ever will be. How is it that certain wallets get names like : ( 1PaYbTcJsAp3QqcQ8FaBxofwdhB1KP4xug ) that's a vanity. Again dont send there I wont send back.

What am I missing?

Long live btc BTC

AFAIK there's nothing like that

It's possible, but for sure, the chance of you and other person getting the same wallet address is too small. You might have a higher chance to get hit by a vehicle or win a lottery than getting the same wallet with other users.

There is literally no way to know if a wallet "is in use" unless if it already has a history of transactions. There haven't been an incident(it's pretty safe to assume) that 2 people had the same address(unless they shared private keys) because they'd need to generate the same exact private keys, which, like bL4nkcode said, is so very unlikely that you might as well say it's impossible.

I am currently running from the zip to make a vanity wallet on my standard rog laptop from 2015. The wallet I want to look like 1Sendmebtc with no preferences to punctuality. It says it will take 6.4 years haha. How true is that considering the bitcoin eater address? Do I have to run a legit miner rig to make these addresses?

That's not accurate. There are (just short of) 2²⁵⁶ private keys, but only 2¹⁶⁰ valid addresses, so on average each address has 2⁹⁶ private keys associated with it.

The bitcoin eater address is just a valid address. Nobody knows the private key.

If your vanity generator is stating 6.4 years, then I'd pick a shorter vanity address and try again. Vanity addresses become exponentially more difficult to find with each additional character. Choosing something like 1sendbtc should bring your search time down to a few days rather than several years.

So nobody had to mine that bitcoin eater address? That would mean that somehow I could by chance make a random btc address?

 I wanted to test one of my addresses that was full if the vanity address would eventually generate my private key. It will not lol.

You are confusing your terminology here. Addresses aren't mined. Nobody ran a vanity generator to find a private key for that address though, if that's what you mean. They simply calculated the correct checksum for the last few characters to make the rest of the address valid, which is fairly trivial to do.

I mean, you can certainly tell the vanity generator to try, but even if your computer could run forever, we would reach the heat death of the universe before you even scratched the surface.

You are talking about a collusion. It is mathematically possible but statistically impossible. There are more possibilities than our minds can understand. 

There are literally 2^256 possibilities of private keys. It is easier to win on a lotto like 10 times in a row.

i have never actually looked at Vanity generators source codes but i believe this is the method they use since there is no other way due to the randomness of the results.
you choose a number between 1 and 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494337 and then use a one way math equation to find a point (x and y coordinate) on a curve. then compute hash of that point using SHA256 then compute the hash of that result using RIPEMD160. then encode it using Base-58.

let's say you chose this number:
371060653216966910279746506141000858658682621300828557694559221585249237607
the address is:
153Z7LAFwAPpinqdAh6n6xSKkBNRr6k1Vd

now you can increment it until you find a "collision" that creates an address starting with "1P"
that requires 53 additions:
371060653216966910279746506141000858658682621300828557694559221585249237660
1PPGS2QKDaiaEY3ZitpjyY2Nm4mRPSifYa

lets say you want it to start with "1Pa" now you have to increment it 383 times
371060653216966910279746506141000858658682621300828557694559221585249237990
1Paf7nhoK1hTc6Z3MWRzVcGB4rGiQYNrLN

if you want "1PaY" then the same thing, i ran it for more than 6100 times without any result so i had to stop the code (not to waste time) but you can see how the number is growing from 53 to 383 to 6100+


that is NOT vanity address. that is a base58 encoded string nothing more.
you can create anything you like in a blinking of an eye. just put any kind of string after 1 without 0OIl chars (that would be BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend) and compute its checksum (that would be f59kuE). now you have a weird address without private key

     I think the address that a wallet generates cannot exist twice. The address has a very large number of characters precisely because the chances of it being duplicated for it to stretch to 0. Addresses are based on some mathematical equations that do not allow the generator to create 2 identical addresses. This still shows how interesting the crypto market is.

Does making vanity addresses require a strong laptop? I'm making one that says 1SENDBTC apparently it will take 2.9 days. I'm willing to wait but If i had a newer gaming laptop would i be able to generate it quicker?

obviously yes.
there is a lot of computation that your computer has to do so the faster it can compute the less time it would take to find an address. there should be two modes, one with CPU (less fast) and another using your GPU (a lot faster) you can use the GPU mode. read the documentation of the project you use for more information.