Bitcoin Forum

I saw some people with a nice bitcoin adress like:
1E1igiusfEjs1pCaGjEERExE9gYcrFwow7       (eliguis)

How did they make this, just make random adresses for days untill you own a cool one with your name in it.
Or is there a better way?

Please explain.

Vanitygen, Google it or see my signature.

Vanitygen: Vanity bitcoin address generator/miner [v0.22] (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25804.0).

Note that address re-use has severe privacy implication (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=279249.0).

I have been using single-use vanity addresses myself.

Edit: Real life example of somebody regretting vanity addresses (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=621770.msg6916724#msg6916724).

This article on the Bitcoin FAQ is pretty straight-forward: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen

These are the vanity addresses that the people make using the brute force. it requires some kind of software and generation of these addresses takes time.

thanks for all the replies!

Well I thought there was a more clever way, but bruteforce it is.

if there was a more clever way it wouldn't be very well encrypted.

Vanitygen actually avoids redoing expensive calculations over and over again (mainly doing additions as I understand it). So it is a little clever.

I know people use vanity generators for addresses like it's no big deal to make millions of addresses,
But at some point if BTC gets mass adored wouldn't we run out of addresses?

No.  Never.

I sure hope it gets mass adored.  :)

Trust me, the sheer keyspace is far larger than that.


@OP: I would advise oclvanitygen (try the updated lifeboat one) rather than just pure vanitygen as GPUs will work more efficiently at finding addresses than CPUs.

Is there another way to create addresses programatically?

I am having a hell of a time trying to get vanitygen to work on RedHat. I just need to be able to produce addresses with private keys offline.

Have you seen my python script built from the electrum codebase?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=612143.0

(just make sure to get a new random seed, dont use the default!)

Thanks for the info. I'll check it out.

if you have any questions dont hesitate to send me a pm

There are a multitude of programs for generating vanity addresses but you should definitely do your research on how they work and their authors before you use them.

What could go wrong for example?

Someone writes a program that creates a public and private key for you, but is easily replicated. All they have to do is run their program to obtain your public key and they then have your private key.

Or something to that affect.

Sounds like you may be interesting in the sx command line utilities (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=259999.0)

As it's just standard python, this should work under Linux as well and is extremely short to review:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=424691.0

If the program creates a private key, uses a hash to find the public key and make a mistake. It could potentially give you a public key and the incorrect private key.