Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I tried googling this but I did not find anything. Figured this would be the best place to ask because of the amount of people here who have a lot of knowledge about this.

So, recently someone offered to make custom BTC adresses for a few people and it seemed really neat to have one for me, but I'm relatively new to bitcoin and someone brought up the issue that if this person has the private key(He said this is what he sends to you, and how you can get the address. Don't really understand it) to your address, he can steal your bitcoin. I have no clue on how this works, and if it is actually to safe to use the address I might get?

Would be nice if somebody could explain it in a noob friendly way. My native language is not english so sorry if I screwed that up

Yes, if someone has the private key, he can spend the bitcoin on the address anytime he wants.

If you want to get a vanity address safely from someone else, you should look for a person to generate a split key vanity address for you.
Or, you can run vanitygen yourself to generate the address all by yourself.

It's not safe, especially if you're new to bitcoin.  You can actually make one yourself with the vanitygen software (download it to your computer).  But, you shouldn't reuse addresses anyway.  I'd recommend to steer clear of vanity addresses until you're more familiar with bitcoin.

Hmm, okay. That's too bad! But better safe than sorry.

The problem with vanity addresses is also that people are lazy and would only compare the first few chars.
So it you had the address 1BATMAN2a2hqZdYv7WN7iy5hcGTUoedAnG than someone could create 1BATMAN2amC8jszfAZQ4EzefiDFSRkjpnG and people would think it's the same address.

If you want to generate a vanity address yourself, don't use a website either. You need to download the vanitygen software from original site and run it offline. Personally, I would not use a vanity address. Using a random address doesn't bother me.

Is the private key is equivalent to the pass phrase or no?

Off-Topic: Your English is pretty good; what's your first language?

^Whoop^ One your private key is online or saved somewhere on your computer, you are $#%

You should create your own public & private key and keep it locked up somewhere ^Grin^

Good luck, I hope, you did not store a lot of Bitcoins on that address.

Or just transfer the BTC to a new wallet?

Why not get a wallet address that has not been encrypted then once you get the address (wallet.dat) encrypt it yourself with a key he has never seen. It seems much more logical. why he needs to generate a key at all is confusing to me, why not just generate the wallet address export the wallet.dat file and then allow the new owner of the address to encrypt it himself (UNLESS) he does plan on stealing the bitcoins from that address.

How can we solve that kind of problem?

I'm Dutch :)

No I did not use the vanity address at all yet; came here to ask if it was safe first

That's not how it works.  The wallet.dat includes the private key.  Encrypting the wallet.dat does no good if someone else has a copy.  It's like you putting your credit card number on this website and then making a file containing that credit card number and then encrypting it.  Who cares if your copy is encrypted as long as others have the private key.

Theres a lot of answer here but only you could decide.

You can either
a. change all of mankind and make them compare more than just the first few characters
b. not use a vanity address

I went for the second option.

I don't get how people manage to send bitcoins to the wrong address though..why not just copy-paste the address? If the receiver didn't paste the correct address, it's their fault. So even if two vanity addresses look similar, it should be easy to distinguish between them

Copy paste does not fix this problem.

Say you are a well known organization (called Batman)  with a vanity address listed for donations. (e.g. 1BATMAN2a2hqZdYv7WN7iy5hcGTUoedAnG).
I could easily create fake homepages that look as if they are affilitated with Batman. On those I would put a "fake" vanity address (e.g. 1BATMAN2amC8jszfAZQ4EzefiDFSRkjpnG).
People would see that it says BATMAN and thus not question the originating homepage any further.

Copy, paste, send bitcoins, --> I have now bitcoins that should have gone to the Batman organization.

(you can substitute Batman with any well known organization that excepts bitcoins)

I understand that, and there will be inevitable deception which applies to different situations as well, but people should be proactive and verify the webpage's credentials before sending donations, particularly if they're going to send a large sum. Iunno. I've been scammed before, yes, I feel stupid, but I learned to be a lot more cautious from thereonafter

Afaik, there is an application that lets users get their desired custom addresses. It's fine to let someone make a custom address for you, as long as you know that person really well. And, also, for your own safety, use that custom address to store only low amounts of btc just in case shit happens.

You can ask someone what is the most common way to do it. It wont fail.