Bitcoin Forum

Seeking a trusted community member to generate a vanity address for me and then help me set it up in my wallet.  Will negotiate price.

I can generate a vanity address for you - no problem.  BUT you do NOT want anyone to do this for you for the simple reason that if I, or anyone, generates the address for you then I/they will know your private key.  It is really not that hard to do yourself.  Just download the program and run it.  I can help you with setup questions and a regular expression for the program if you want me to.

BTW I own a lot of cool addresses including http://firstbits.com/1xyzzy (http://firstbits.com/1xyzzy)  If you know what that means then you are older than dirt (like me).

It truly is easier that almost anything, and depending on how detailed your vanity string is, you can produce it in minutes.

And the advice about private keys is really, really good. There are now four things you should never, ever trust anyone else with... your private keys, your tools, your sister's virtue, and your truck.

Allright, I may give the program another shot then.  It would be great if I could have some assistance and I'd gladly tip you.  I can't do it tonight though, I must sleep.

I had to google xyzzy, so I must confess my youth...   :P

perhaps not the place for this, but can this program generate entire specific addresses? i have 5btc still stuck in an old deepbit account that i stupidly locked the out address on and reinstalled my wallet....

Yeah, sure, it'll only take something like 4.55 hundred trillion trillion trillion centuries assuming a giant cluster of GPUs hashing away trying to match one specific address!

No.* If it could then that means Bitcoin is broken.   I mean forget your 5 BTC.  There are addresses with 10K BTC. Just generate that address and bingo  10K BTC richer.


* Technically it could however we would reach the heat death of the universe before you attempted even a billionth of 1% of possible keys and that is if you used a planetary sized super computer.  I find "no" the simpler albeit not exactly accurate answer.

Following Moores law, in 80 years, the amount of time to find a key with this part: '18ox2ACVt2hNd8gSmF9ayR9msVW' (7 characters missing) would take 5.78 Years.  To find the full key, would still be much, much longer..  Thought i'd throw some math out there lol...

Generally math involves math.  You can't say following mores law in 80 years I can do x with ... BLANK.  With an abacus?  With all the computing power on the planet?  With the matrix?  With a human turk consisting of all the children in China?

that makes sense, i figured it probably couldn't be done just for the reason of knowing a hella btc rich persons address so you can get at it. thanks for the answers though, figured it was worth asking :P

First, a public address is not the key you are looking for, it is the hash of the key.  So, if you ever did find a key pair that hashes to a certain address there is a chance that with all your efforts you end up with the wrong key pair.

Second, by too long we mean the following:

Here are some estimates for generating some addresses using just my laptop.  You can extrapolate to a faster system, even a GPU system or even 100,000 GPUs and see that it is “impossible”:


From above you can kind see that it would take a “long” time to find a key pair that generates any one public address.

In fact the vanitygen program will not calculate how long it would take (too large) but to just get most of one (which does not get you the coins) here is the output from the program showing that you have a 50% chance of finding only most of one in 6e32 years:

C:\downloads\www.bitcoin.org>vanitygen 1LJY4ey9FVKKuodaDr84sdZDXLy
Difficulty: 2794725737275825531787289201741966674434639341
[102.98 Kkey/s][total 1497088][Prob 0.0%][50% in 5.965101e+032y]

I found just a few for you. I cut off the end of the addresses and keys, the addresses below is not enough to use them. If you want one, I can put the one(s) you want into a new wallet.dat and send it to you, or send you privkeys.

If you want to make your own and have a fast ATI card, you can use oclvanitygen. If you want to import the key you found into your unencrypted wallet, you can use pywallet (you must install Python too). Search will help you find these.

It's always fun to look at vanitygen results and see if something magical appeared, like 1markiopro

Address: 1mARKiowqn4WZRBJeFx5MyMRc4z....

1.1 Ghash/s rig (3 instances of overclocked 5850s) would do 12345678 in about 2 hours compared to 70 days on a laptop CPU but it's still almost a week for 123456789 and almost a year for 123456879a.

I wonder who searched the longest for their address? :>
few hours is a maximum for me

I have seen a thread related to the most difficult vanity address found to date but I can't find it right now.

Several pages back on the Vanitygen topic. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25804.msg611858#msg611858)

My 1bitcoins is estimated 88.7 days @ 300Kkey/s (50% chance); etotheipi's unusual all-uppercase vanitygen was 70 days @ 300Kkey/s.

Just a reminder - if you are using GPU(s), set back you vram frequency to stock or even overclock, me speed increases by 1/3 between 265 MHz and 1100 MHz on a 5850.

what if quantum computing were to do the calculating? (suck it Moore's Law!) Imagine just 1 quantum computer hashing away!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer#Developments

I think they still need 'a bit' of more development to do that.

Anyways, anyone interested in buying an address starting with 1BitCoin or 1BiTcoin?  ;D

The pun just keeps on rolling!  :D

Shor's algorithm can't be used to speed up brute force attacks against Bitcoin addresses (which is what Vanity gen is except it accepts partial matches).  Satoshi was decades ahead of his time (or very lucky).    The "issue" or "strength" depending on how you look at it (quantum resistance) comes from the fact that we don't use public key & private key.  We use address which is a hash of the public key and private key.  If the public key is unknown shor's algorithm can't be used.

I wanted to get 1bitcoin but it is already "taken" with respect to firstbits:  http://firstbits.com/1BitCoin (http://firstbits.com/1BitCoin) and it is the "black hole" address 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE - one of my favorite BTC black holes.

pm sent

I thought I might have a a contender - a nine-letter that uses "o" (twice the difficulty, since there is no Base58 "O" substitute in a case-insensitive search):

If I keep doing this instead of mining bitcoins, I might end up 1DEsTiTuteD8i6XNrV3Ueeb4rUu1EtwPVY...

 :)

Destituted ... haha  ;D

I'll send you a PM, thanks for the list!

You should PM me an email address to send the private key, preferably one where you use pop3/smtp, not webmail. Having the private key means someone would have access to any bitcoins in that address, so you don't want them stored on a webmail or forum message database where curious eyes might snoop. Generating your own is even better than letting an internet stranger make you an address.

Of course, if you send me your pgp public key, I could encrypt the email too (or even post it anywhere and only you could decrypt the contents). Getting pgp or gnupg set up would be a good newbie task to learn about encryption (http://www.utexas.edu/its/help/digital-certificates/837)...

I'll make a "pywallet for dummies" walkthrough post in the pywallet topic (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=34028.0) in a bit, showing how to set it up and use the web interface.

---

I don't like the sound of this...

Freud calls this "projection" - traits we know about ourselves and don't like, we also project (http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=118760) onto others.

He was warned that this is not the best idea in post #2 on this thread.  He decided to trust deepceleron and that is his informed choice.

deepceleron:  BTW I have been toying with ideas on how to create a secure system of "distributed vanity address mining" on various other threads.  I was just about to do it when Gavin brought up the point that BIP 16 will make vanity address generation and my distributed vanity address generation idea easier and less computationally intensive.  If BIP 16 passes then we should be able to make much longer vanity addresses for the new addresses that start with 3.

You seem to do a lot of address generation.  Would you be interested in joining a vanity address generating pool (for pay) - if such a thing was to be created?

I might, and i believe a ton of people would, granted the pay was higher than just mining BTC/NMC

Markio finally gave up on vanitygen himself (in eight hours of GPU generating, I only found one "hard" lower-case 1markio, after all), and requested my help, and a new wallet.dat was fine for him.

Send markio some coins!
http://we.lovebitco.in/img/markio-screenshot.png

Note: I ran bitcoin -keypool=0 at all times while creating the wallet. There are only these five addresses in the wallet; when he first uses it, Bitcoin will then create the 100-key reserve pool. This is important - pressing "create new address" will give keys from the pool he generated on his computer, so any future addresses I can't possibly know.


PS. Why did some anonyfounder decide to store the Bitcoin settings in the wallet instead of an .ini file or registry??

    "settings": {
        "addrProxy": "127.0.0.1:23075", 
        "fMinimizeOnClose": "False", 
        "fMinimizeToTray": "False", 
        "fUseProxy": "False", 
        "fUseUPnP": "False"
    },

I'm learning a lot from this experience and I've got some cool new addresses, thanks again deepceleron

Good thing I never traded any vanity addresses, didn't even THINK about keypool until now. Definitely a very important thing to be conscious of.

Now you don't need to trust a third party to generate your vanity addresses:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84569