Bitcoin Forum

I made a simple vanity address generator in Java, utilizing bitcoinj. (URL Removed, see Updates below.)

UPDATE: No more in-browser Java applet. Now strictly a downloadable desktop application.

UPDATE: As I have not maintained this application for some time, I feel it is best to remove it until I have time to update the code. Consider samr7's vanitygen (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25804.0).

Thanks for your interest! I hope to revisit this some day soon.

Interesting...

If you sped it up it would be great.

How about giving time estimates rather than things like "Hard", "brutal..."?
.

I found this humorous:


Ideally, wouldn't you preferred providing a unique vanity address, one hashed by the app?

~Bruno~

He, unfortunately, did not find it useful.

1NYhM2pzT6PDfZyXbyFm3dVcoob4phrGc5 stands for:
New York helps Me to pee zebra Trees  :D

Ugh, it was sooooooo obvious ;D

lool i do the same thing to remember some of them

Look at his username.

You guys wanted so much to make fun of him that you ended up ridiculing yourselves...

That would imply that I have any modesty. I lost that sensibility years ago and feel much better without it. Besides, it wasn't ridicule I was displaying, but my incredible thesaurusless vocabulary.  :D

All kidding aside. Welcome to the Bitcoin community. Your code-fu is greatly needed.

That still doesn't explain why he pees zebra trees.

heh

welcome to the forum Nyhm and thanks for making that useful website for for us :)

Thanks for having a look, everyone. This thread is pretty amusing.


I'm not really motivated to make this fast. My motivation was just to experiment (mainly with the BitCoinJ (http://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/) lib), and my design goal was simplicity. If you want fast, there are alternatives.


Because it's a random process (refer to the description for more details). You could put in a 16 character vanity word and find it in 2 seconds or 2 millennia. So, I came up with amusing names to suggest how unlikely you are to find a vanity word, based on length.


I found it humorous, too... As others pointed out, both my username and the site address match my vanity address. I actually had text on the page explaining this, but I cut it out because I thought it was obvious enough... (and I had already reached my quota of obvious statements).

Don't worry, I offer full absolution through Bitcoin donation!


I can't believe you figured out exactly what that stands for.

Anyway, I didn't know if anyone else would find this useful, but I wanted to put something up, since I'm enthralled with Bitcoin (and write Java applications). Now, to figure out a way to earn some BTC to experiment with...

Thanks for welcoming me to the community, by the way! I hope to have time to tinker with Bitcoin some more some day.

Gulp!

Okay! Here's my explanation, and I'm sticking to it. We, as a community, jab members we like, Nyhm. (damn, I hope he buys this story)

Seriously, I (now we) missed it. I (not we, unless...) was looking for the address to match the company's name, hence my post. I, at no time was dissing you or your company. Just making an observation. I'm glad to read that you're a good-nature fellow. The site look swell, BTW.

~Bruno~

Oh, hey, no problem, but I do appreciate you taking the time to follow up, Phinnaeus Gage. No offense taken at all.

Nyhm is just my pseudonym I use for games and such, and nyhm.net is just my personal playground for experimenting and whatnot. I'm very open to input and discussion, and it's fine to let me know what you think. I'm excited to have some humble offering to put out there for the Bitcoin community, and maybe some will appreciate some part of it.

My motivation right now is just to tinker when I can, and get familiar with the community. Bitcoin might be the most interesting software/technology I've encountered since the Internet itself. Eventually, I could see myself focusing my entire career toward Bitcoin-related software development... but that's tomorrow. Today, my time is entirely consumed developing/releasing/operating Island Forge (http://islandforge.com), which has nothing (yet?) to do with Bitcoin. (Also see my lofty-sounding Potential Games Bitcoin Initiative (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=74870.msg828997#msg828997))... but I digress.

I'm glad to make everyone's acquaintance, and any further discussion of the vanity generator is most welcome.

Boy, did I screw up big time! I just realized that the name of your site is the same as your moniker and IS in the vanity address. My eyesight is getting worse, I believe. And my mind. Before penning my first post, I even double checked the facts: http://nyhm.net and 1NYhM2pzT6PDfZyXbyFm3dVcoob4phrGc5 have nothing in common. What a fucking idiot I am.

~Bruno~

We forgive you, Bruno! ...as always...  ::)

Released new version (v0.2) of the applet!

• Case sensitive option
• Any position option
• Watch as literally dozens of addresses per second are computed!

Yes, it's still slow, but my motivation is experimentation. See the page for details. (http://nyhm.net/bitcoin/vanityaddr/)

Thanks for your interest and feedback!

Yes, I mean that case sensitive is harder than insensitive. I see how my wording was ambiguous. I think the web page (http://nyhm.net/bitcoin/vanityaddr/) explains it better. The reason is because it's harder to find an exact match (case sensitive). Also, in addition, the applet is wicked slow.

I'm currently searching for an address beginning with 'scott' @71 keys/second.

How long (roughly) could I be waiting for??  :D

I plugged this into my vanitygen and checked: 1scott

You have a 50% chance in 38 minutes at 4.61 MKeys/s
(I didn't disable my mining so it didn't run as fast as it can, 20 MKeys/s)

So doing some math that's about 4610000/71*38 minutes or 28.5 days.
And that's 50% chance.

If you want a name you can post a public key generated on bitaddress.org (save the private key!). I can use that to generate your name in 10 minutes and send you the "partial private key" which you can combine with your private key and have a secure vanity address. I'm only offering because I'm interested in trying out this new feature (third party keys) in vanitygen.

Okay, thank you.

I'm not entirely sure of how this works, so you may have to explain to me as we go along  :)

Here's the public key I've just generated: 1hueY3mDiCcof3QSeFmBk7VSHnnyXp1hJ

I have made a note of the private key.

Actually the address is not the same as the public key. (The address is a hash of the public key.) You'll need to return to bitaddress and paste the private key into the wallet details tab and look at the details. It will give you a public key that is 130 chars long (the third value down).

After I posted my suggestion I realized that in order to combine the partial private key with your private key you'd need to get the keyconv utility from the vanitygen binaries zip file here,

https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen/downloads     (get v0.19 not the older 0.18)

But then if you get that then why not just run the vanitygen program yourself...
To my knowledge there isn't an online way to combine keys yet. So if you still want to do this I'm game but it may not offer much benefit unless on your system vanitygen takes many days to run. In  which case this will still save you lots of time.

Thanks for your offer of help on this.

All things considered, I think I will spend the time getting vanitygen to work - that way I can generate as many as I like :)

Scott - now you see why I created my Java vanity application (this thread) - simplicity. It's not fast, but it's easy to use!

Generating vanity addresses is a random process. I've hit "hard" addresses in minutes, or in hours. Other generators are certainly faster than my application, but mine is simpler, especially if you're not a Bitcoin guru (yet).

I can definitely see why you've created this app  ;D

I've half-heartedly tried to get vanitygen to work, but gave up!

I think I'll just be patient :)

It shouldn't be hard. Assuming on Windows, you unzip the binaries zip file.
Then open a command prompt (Start, Run, "cmd") and change to the correct directory.
Then type the command,

vanitygen 1scott

it should output some stats info and show you a percent progress value as it scans.

You can also do this by double-clicking an icon but you would have to make a shortcut to the exe file and set it so it opens a cmd shell.

I'm on Linux so I'm just saying this from memory (of years ago).

Anyway, offer still stands if you want to send me the public key.

Amazing, I have it working :D

I was just clicking the .exe files after I downloaded them; I had no idea I had to go through the command prompt.

I'm getting over 600 keys/second and it says 50% chance in 4.3 hours :)

Thanks for your help with this.

BkkCoins plays hard-ball. A lot of folks would probably be angry at a "competitor" hijacking users from their thread, but I'm all for community participation. The take-away is that what many developers think is user-friendly is still way off base from actual normal users:


Yipes (and I'm a developer). Nonetheless, I'm glad you got vanitygen working for you Scott J!

The next release of my Simple Vanity app (as well as my simple VanillaWallet (http://vanillawallet.com)) will include a Windows exe (and Mac app bundle) to make it even easier to launch. Maybe someday I can even include GPU support to make it as fast as vanitygen.

This was a fun discussion! I'm always happy to have folks try my software.

Runs kinda slow :(

Hi Mr. Mantis. Yes, it certainly does! Please refer to the OP, and the discussion, and the text on the site for clarification. As I write this, I'm trying to generate a new 4-character address and it's taking HOURS (usually only minutes for such short words).

My first goals were to make it simple and make it work. It is possible to make it faster (and remain simple), but I can't really spend the time right now... Unless there is someone interested in sponsoring (BTC) further development...

I appreciate you trying it out!

Just bought you a coffee.

fd4590eec8d9608a6d0f3dc4f03324cb37c0f5956c7d1a6714ab7a5054bbe383

Keep up the good work and don't mind the troll :)

Hurray! I'm still giddy whenever any coin comes in! Every bit is much appreciated, and thank you for your encouraging words.

Sorry for the hijack.
Just trying to help someone out who was going to have to run for 28 days :)
Note,
- I'm not the dev for vanitygen, just some random user.
- I don't have any stake in whatever program people use.
- vanitygen is the program that runs on CPUs.
- oclvanitygen is a companion one that uses GPUs.
- this thread was months old, even dead, so I didn't think it much harm to help a user with his question

Just to round this off, I have found the address. I almost got to 75% probability!

Here it is: 1scottoVnKhtbLDDZwxTaEaYTzKGj4cRK

Thanks Nyhm and BkkCoins for your service and helpful posts.

For real, I'm not disgruntled. Your points are entirely valid. My apologies if I came off as aggressive in my retort; I blame it on being overworked and under/not paid. I learned a thing or two from the discussion, and my original intent behind my generator was to experiment and learn about Bitcoin. I even refer people to Vanitygen in my OP! Ugh, I need more sleep (and less coffee). Sorry.

The downside is that I'm envious of how fast vanitygen is. I've been cranking on a 5-letter word for hours now with my code.

Scott - I'm very glad you found your vanity address! Sorry you got tossed and turned a bit in the process.

Thanks to whoever sent .05 BTC to my address - I assume it was one of you guys  :)

Thought you'd like to know if your new address was fully functional! Share and enjoy.

PS: Coincidence or Karma? The exchange rate of BTC is up right now, and I was about to use fastcash4bitcoins.com (http://fastcash4bitcoins.com) to cash out what meager coin I have (as much as I like bitcoins, I also like groceries). I was 0.05 short of the minimum. Please understand, I'm not asking for anything. I was testy yesterday and this is the penance. I'm into Bitcoin for the long haul, so there will be other days.

It is funny how thing work out, but I don't think you have cause to apologise :)

If you need some odd BTC, please PM me it would be my pleasure.

And I've added your service to my signature. I'll keep it there for a few weeks.

Scott J, thanks so much for linking my generator in your sig for so long.

I've just updated the vanity page (http://nyhm.net/bitcoin/vanity/) (and my Bitcoin portfolio (http://nyhm.net/bitcoin/) page). What do you think?

No probs, it's my pleasure :)

The vanity generator looks really good, I'm playing with it now.

Though it would be good to still be able to do it within the browser rather than download the file and run.

I'm also interested in this secret project  :-X ;D

Applets have lots of pitfalls. They can be made to work properly, but I decided to focus my efforts on providing a solid application.

Running software in-browser also tends to scare away Bitcoin users, so downloading an application is desirable. (You can even run it on an offline computer if you're really paranoid.)

The secret project is almost ready. I'm very excited about it myself!

That's a good point, I can see how a downloaded app is preferable.

Let me know when this secret project come to fruition  8)

Probably a good idea to take all funds out of keys generated with this program until this risk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133122.0) is resolved...

Can you elaborate? Is the risk lack of entropy in the RNG? the other thread doesn't mention this tool explicitly...

I don't think anyone knows for sure what's up yet. I spoke to TheButterZone on IRC and he said it was this tool.

Although I recognize the theoretical possibility of a collision, I believe the concept that this vanity generator created a collision or has a weakness making collision even remotely possible (to any realistic degree) is baseless speculation. Nonetheless, here is my post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133122.msg1419422#msg1419422) on the thread in question. I will follow up in a couple days. Happy holidays.

it's nice, but really...too slow !
vanitygen is much faster

Yep - as advertised! Thanks for trying it out.

It happened to me. Three weeks ago I was interested in creating some "serial" vanity addresses. Looking around to find an offline generator, I found Simple Vanity, I knew it was slow (on my netbook it really crawled), but it didn't need compiling to work under Linux, it had a cute GUI, and I just wished to try out with some very short vanity word (mostly acronyms from 2 to 3, maybe 4 characters, excluding the 1).
Used it very occasionally for 3/4 days, then, after it found the nth address I was looking for, I saved it, restarted and after a minute or so it found another one, to my surprise the address was identical to another previous generated one! I stopped using it, and I am afraid it is better to never use that bunch of addresses.

I'm glad you find the interface to be cute, and the app easy to use.

Randomly reproducing an address/key is remarkable - almost inconceivable - so thanks for reporting it. The current version (v0.4) is based on bitcoinj v0.5.2 (rather old). The way it makes keys is to call new ECKey() - that's it (plan to open source next version). Beneath bitcoinj-0.5.2 is bouncycastle (replaced by spongycastle in newer versions of bitcoinj). I haven't investigated the particular random generation, but it should be impossible to produce the results you've observed; therefore it's certainly worth looking into whether bitcoinj could have such a weakness.

I'll bring this up with the bitcoinj folks to see if anyone can offer any further insight.

Thanks.
If it can be helpful I can try to find those "double keys" or try to remember the "vanity words" (I'll PM you in the case). By the way, now I'm using vanitygen under wine and command line. It is way faster.

ECKey uses SecureRandom and always has. That's provided by Java, it's not a part of any library that's used. You can see the implementation used on Unix systems here:

http://grepcode.com/file/repository.grepcode.com/java/root/jdk/openjdk/6-b14/sun/security/provider/NativePRNG.java?av=f

If you run the app twice and it generates the same vanity address, that rather implies that your kernel has completely run out of entropy and is feeding apps repeated data, so the PRNG on top is looping. I think it is maybe expected to happen if you try and generate vanity addresses - one reason to not do it, frankly. I'm not sure you can generate really huge quantities of cryptographically random numbers on a regular PC if left unattended, it has to get entropy from somewhere and without any user interaction the best it can manage is consuming its own interrupt timings. That's why GPG and friends tell you to mash the keyboard and wave the mouse around when making keys, which obviously you aren't doing in this case.

As far as I know companies or organisations that need enormous streams of crypto-strong random numbers use a hardware RNG that measures Johnson–Nyquist noise. Alternatively HAVAGE (http://www.irisa.fr/caps/projects/hipsor/) may work well if you need random numbers on servers, but I haven't tried it for myself.

I know there's some kind of gut appeal to having a vanity address, but seriously guys, I wouldn't go there. Not only do you open yourselves up to questions of whether your random numbers are good enough, but you leak private data left right and center. There's a good reason why Bitcoin-Qt generates new addresses for you all the time.

While we're on the topic of RNGs. I've got a gen 2 i7 CPU which is supposed to have a true RNG baked into the die.  I haven't been able to find a straight answer on the web whether recent linux kernels are taking advantage of this yet. Is this piped into /dev/(u)random etc?

I know Jeff Garzik has been involved in this area as I saw some tools he wrote to enable the rng, but the process was fiddly and I assumed we'd see this in stock kernels pretty soon? I just can't seem to find out if I was right anywhere.

Anyone know? Thanks.

I think it doesn't change anything, but I didn't run twice, the app paused itself when the  address was found, I copied it then hit the start button again.
The netbook wasn't unattended, I'm a bit ill, so I spend too very much time doing various things on it on the couch (often I fall asleep with the PC over my belly). Even the mouse usually doesn't stay still by itself, lol, I'm using a wacom tablet on a very unstable position.

If the kernel can run out of entropy, there is something seriously wrong about how it is generating random numbers.

It's a common misconception to think that generating large amounts of cryptographic quality random data requires large amounts of hardware randomness. The crypto community that actually understands this stuff - as opposed to the uninformed and those trying to sell products - have realized for decades that the right approach to generating random numbers for crypto is to use a random pool in conjunction with a cryptographic quality pseudo-random number generator. (PRNG) Bruce Shneier and Niels Ferguson's Fortuna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortuna_(PRNG)) algorithm is a good example of a very well thought out version of this approach, but the basic idea is really simple: maintain a pool of random bits, use a cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generator to generate pseudo-random data from that pool in whatever amount is required, and as truly random data is generated in the system, mix it into that pool. The volume of truly random, and unknown to the attacker, bits required is small because the entropy of the pool never decreases. Even on a virtual machine generating 128bits of random data from network packet timings isn't too hard and can be done relatively quickly - hardware random number generators simply make that process faster and should be fed through a random pool + PRNG anyway to protect you if the hardware generator fails.

Smartcards are actually a very interesting example of this philosophy: to generate random numbers they sometimes have as little as a random seed built into the hardware at the factory and a counter guaranteed to always increment. To generate a random number the counter is incremented, verified to have incremented properly, and then something like SHA256(seed + counter) is computed to generate the number.  Less daring designs still collect environmental entropy and mix it into the pool with XOR, but in an application where compromise of the smart-card compromises the whole system anyway this seemingly insecure approach is still not the weak link in the system.

Get yourself a copy of Shneier's Cryptography Engineering (http://www.schneier.com/book-ce.html) and read it carefully. Frankly I'm kinda surprised, and a bit worried, to see you have such a basic misunderstanding of cryptography given you maintain bitcoinj.

Couldn't it be significantly sped up? I think other generators are at about 300 @ second.

You can calculate this yourself. The address is written in base58 which means that you would have to go through on average W=1/2*(58)^n addresses where n is the number of characters in your vanity string before finding your vanity address. For n=4 this means W=5.7m addresses. I can only calculate s=20-30 a second so this calculation would take me t=W/s=63 hours which is more than two days...

The algorithm can probably be speeded up and it should also be much much faster to calculate this on an ASIC since you are basically doing a lot of the same work as when calculating hashes for bitcoin mining.

Nice java app.

Keep up the good work!

I try this but very slow and I have broken 3 times now waiting for some fast work from this Vanity

Good work, thanks.

I really like your software. Would it be hard to implement Minikey for private key and other cryptocurrency (Litecoin, Namecoin, Novacoin, Feathercoin) ?

I would be willing to give a donation for it.

so your saying if I simply go to bitcoinrich list, then copy and paste the #1 bitcoin address in there, it'll find me a private key?   :(

Yes, but it will take until the heat death of the universe to match all 32 characters.
Or it could happen in 1 minute....with good luck.