Bitcoin Forum

Just wondering out loud here..

Is it possible to create/choose our own Bitcoin address & public key?

Do you mean vanity address?

Like this one? [GUIDE] How To Create Vanity Address (Segwit)  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5144752.0) or Pretty Addy Giveaway - part 2 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1813624.0/) by LoyceV.

oh wow.. it really could. Lol.. nice.

Of course, you can generate any private key you want using something like bitaddress (offline, of course) and then use it to calculate the public key as well.  Here is a guide that shows you how to do that: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-generate-your-very-own-bitcoin-private-key-7ad0f4936e6c/

Generating the public key first, makes things a lot more difficult because then you have to brute force the entire address space for the corresponding private key, which for obvious reasons of theft is not possible. It is more practical to generate part of the public key by hand, which is done when you make a vanity address.

Your bitcoin address is derived from your private key through a one way function. So, it's not possible to have a bitcoin address with any character you want if you want to own its private key and can spend fund from that.
Note that even if you want to have a specific address without owning the private key, you can't select all the characters. Because the last few characters of a bitcoin address are checksum and are a function of the other characters. A good example of such address is 1111111111111111111114olvt2.

It's only possible to generate a vanity address in which you select a few characters.
For having a vanity address, you generate private keys again and again until the derived address matches your criteria.

You need good hardware to generate a vanity address and I hope you understand that beyond the 1st few characters it is impossible to generate larger vanity addresses. This depends on your hardware a little on the speed but after 5/6 characters it becomes very difficult and impossible after a certain amount of characters. You cannot have a vanity address of the full btc address because no one has the capability of doing that and thankfully that is the way it is because that would break btc.

Also know that the more characters you want the more computational power it takes, generating just first 4 characters can take a minute, 5 characters can take an hour, 6 characters can take 2 days, 7 characters can take 3 or more months, 8 characters can take 13 years or more if using just a computer, but you can use GPU to increase the computational power.

You mean characters instead of words but you are right. The more characters you want to generate the better your computer hardware you will need and the more time you will need but at a certain point it becomes impossible and this is just to have a unique address that does not benefit you except for vanity.

Your benchmarks are a little off. In 2 seconds, I was able to generate >500 addresses starting with "bc1qkrash", which is 5 characters, and it took me 3 minutes to generate the following address starting with "krashfre" (since "i" is an invalid character), which is 8 characters. I've provided the private key as well so you can check I'm not just making it up. :P (But obviously no one should ever use this private key or address!)


OP, if you do want a similar vanity address, then there are ways of me or someone else generating one securely for you using a method known as split keys.

Yes, like this you mean? https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/1SPLiTKEYbLy5Da8BNjVj3RBhSGRDDa9J
If all the content everyone is dropping on you is a little "technical" there is a service made to simplify it.
https://1splitkey.com its a little different than all the other services out there, we are the only mainstream service like this that offers split key generation for vanity wallets.
Many people on the forums use our service, it was designed to be secure & safe.
If you have the capacity its advisable to do it yourself for additional layer of security. My website should help educate you in the process.
I really appreciate all the support guys.

The times for bech-32 addresses are much shorter than for base-58 addresses because of the reduced number of symbols. Finding a base-58 character is equivalent to finding ⁵⁸/₃₂, or 1.8 bech-32 characters. So, finding 1krashfir... will take about 116 times as long as finding bc1qkrashfre...

58 being a weird base has its own implementation difficulties which don't exist for a base 32 which also aligns easily with the available variable types under the hood which makes implementation easy and so much faster for Bech32.

Sure, but when we can generate P2WPKH vanity addresses significantly more easily and more quickly than P2PKH addresses, then why even consider generating P2PKH vanity addresses? Hell, why even consider using P2PKH addresses at all anymore? All good wallets default to P2WPKH address, and several wallets won't even generate P2PKH address without some work around now. I haven't used one at all for a couple of years, and before that I only used them when withdrawing chips from ChipMixer.

The only benefit I can see for legacy addresses is the standardized signing mechanism, but this is trivial to overcome by just using Electrum.