Bitcoin Forum

It's an honest question, I'm just wondering if Vanity Address generators create a bunch of unusable addresses...

What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

My point exactly. xD

Just kidding, but I mean after a Vanity Generator goes through different addresses, does it make it so that certain address is no longer available for others to use?

There are almost unlimited address.

Almost.

I think it would be fair to get rid of the "almost" in this case.  What was that address factoid? Something like if 100,000 addresses were created every second since the beginning of the universe there still would be unused addresses left over.

Oh shit... I guess that is a ton, so I guess my skepticism is fading.

Oh boy, here we go again.

1. There are almost 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,936 possible ECDSA private keys. Almost.
Most people know how to count to the bolded part.

Read this whole thread starting from this post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=892752.msg9909378#msg9909378

To generate a used address, unless due to a glitch, you'd need a dyson sphere, a young star, negative energy and the knowledge of how to open a wormhole for the purpose of time-traveling to the future.

Quadrillion, right?

Theymos really needs to add a button to insert this very large number in the text field.

If you want the same explanation in a video format, here's a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHVKk7DHk
Yes, the numbers are huge.

Using the basic quantitative appreciation system of the human brain "one, two, three, many, lots" we can see that the number of addresses is "lots", since the total MIPS possible for the top 500 is "lots" then if we used all those to brute force all the addresses, then we'd have it done in no time, maybe between lunch and dinner. Unless you were hungry, then it would seem longer.

*trollface*

No, that's the whole point behind bitcoin's operation as I understand it. That's how you can make offline addresses because the solution space is so large that it is for all practical purposes impossible to generate an address that has already been generated before.  Which also, as I understand it, would be the equivalent to hacking your account, which can only happen if you had poor entropy by using a bad brain wallet password or bad random number generator, etc.  
 

Hello, the addresses search function of vanity gen may be running a dozen million keys a second but they are not being stored by the program. it outputs ones relevant to your search prefix only. as user remember remember the 5th pointed out theres an absurd amount of possible private keys, but even if your computer tripped over one the vanity gen program is not searching for collisions while also searching for your prefix, so you would never know. You could try using vanity gen to brute force a well known address but it only takes prefix sizes for a certain length nowhere near the size of a bitcoin public address. and by the time the heat death of the universe passed you by you might still not have been able to crack into those coins ;)

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.

Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.

The exchange would at some point use another address. I think you are still not getting the billion years concept.

Targeting a specific address wouldn't matter.  The odds are so astronomically high that I can't even think of a statistical analogy.  Probably something along the lines of winning the powerball lottery hundreds of times, in a row, with only a single ticket for each lottery.

Yes, it can happen.  But at some point you have to just accept that it won't ever happen in the lifetime of the universe, unless a flaw is discovered that allows somebody to reverse the process of creating an asymmetrical key pair.

following the offtopic discussion: it'd be as lucky as me typing "setgenerate true 1" in my wallet and mining a block in 5-10 minutes today.  actually me mining that block in a few minutes is much much more likely than finding a collision to a known rich address or even a known address. I think I read theres been 1 known collision (seperate priv keys control same address) so far, and it was to an unused address.

So this means it can be done.  ;D

A random address collision is a bit more likely than you'd think, but given the size of the address range, still bloody unlikely. To get a handle on that, see... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Also they are not wasting these addresses. Everyone else can generate the same address again (It's indeed unlikely, but possible).

Does it not bug you at all that someone can generate the same address as another person. However unlikely it is, it's still possible.

What people don't seem to get is that those addresses are not being 'registered' anywhere or taken out of the pool free for people to take.

If you generate a new address, you just pick a random private key and see which address this key controls (easily computable), which is then your Bitcoin address. (The opposite isn't possible, at least there is no known method as of now) This is one of the things that make Bitcoin safe.

Yes but what no one mentioned so far is that vanity addresses may not be
nearly as random or collision resistant as normal addresses.  For that
reason, some people don't advocate them.

They don't hurt Bitcoin, but I doubt they are the highest security
addresses.

VanityGen generates random numbers. These all already exist.

VanityGen does not do anything.

You need to send bitcoin to an address for that address to be put into use on the blockchain.

You could generate a billion addresses per second, they would not go onto the blockchain.

Well, do you've got any proof of that? I mean, they're merely the result of a hashing function (applied multiple times) to an input that may or may not be random. There would have to be a connection between addresses with certain characteristics (preferred in vanity addresses) and the input of the hashing function.

I have no proof whatsoever, I just thought I heard something about there being a risk.
I guess if they are just hashing and throwing away everything that's not the chosen  vanity
its cool, but i thought it was more complicated than that.

No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

Well, effectively he is right, you could just tell your vanity-generator (or whatnot) to look for that address's private key, but it would effectively be futile since the chances are astronomically low of succeeding (like, really low... Not even worth trying)

With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...

First of all: RAM doesn't help you much with performing SHA256 hashs. 800+ keys/s are nothing.
Imagine there are 100m Addresses in use with bitcoins in them (Which is genereous, as of now). Hell, say there are 1b addresses in use, even! There are 2 ^ 160 possible addresses (1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976). To find the key to one address that is in use, you'd statistically still have to calculate 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655 addresses.
Let's say you want this done in 50 years (finding a collision), you'd have to calculate 926878258073885666034807732569 addresses/s. For 50 years non-stop.
But then again, my calculations may be off...  :P

+1 for a creative way to answer something asked for the 157,248th time.

off-topic: +1 to see U back again.

Most of the people thought u were the best poster of 2014 => https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=907916.0

Where were u have been for so long ?

Instead of posting the silly picture of the star again, here is a link to a Bruce Schneier article about how a supernova has only enough energy to theoretically cycle through a 219-bit counter (and no energy left to do any additional computation).

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html

If current ASIC technology were to be modified slightly then it would be possible to check trillions of private keys every second for only a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment. The chances of finding a specific private key to a btc address are still very small

regular address generators also produce tons of unused addresses except much quicker.

Back in the 70's they thought two digits for the Year field is all anyone needed. Use 2 bytes instead of 4 and save a ton of memory. When Y2K came around, people panicked.

The Unix doomsday is Jan 19, 2038, when Unix time rolls over to 00000000000000.  Someone decided that a double precision data type is all they needed (8 bytes) for Unix time. When 2038 comes around, everyone will be scrambling again.

FAT file system allowed for storage devices up to 4GB. Who's ever going to use for than 4GB? That's an unheard of amount of memory back in 1980 when 10MB hard drives cost $2000 and floppy disks were the norm.

Oh wait, 4GB isn't enough. Let's make FAT32 with a limit of 2TB.  No one will ever use 2TB on a home computer.

Oh no! 2TB isn't that much after all. Let's go to NTFS.  What's the limit on NTFS? I haven't had time to look it up.

Mistakes after mistakes have been made and will continue to be made. Although it seems that Bitcoin addresses are nearly infinite, there still is a limit. While that limit cannot be reasonably achieved right now, that may change in the future.

Perhaps, but do you realize that if the hashpower of the entire bitcoin network were spent on creating addresses , it would take over 21 trillion years to generate 2^128 addresses?

Quite right, 2 days and i generated ~50 million addresses using a single machine (still haven't imported them) now, with 1000 machines that would be 25 billion addresses a day, 10k computers would make that 250 billion address a day. 250 000 000 000 is still very minute in regard tthe total  ? 2^96 , but we must always remember that number is a theoretical limit. there is no guarantee that if we  could, we would end up with the exact number or anything remotely in the range. As the number passes a certain mark , it becomes more likely that a collision will occur. And the more we keep going the higher the frequency of collisions because address generation is not a straight line.

Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision, but i think that the exaggeration of  terms needs to stop. We are talking about general purpose CPUs and trying to use their capabilities as a metric to measure what we can do, which is wrong because maybe soon, someone is going to go for that Vanity ASIC which as you know has the potential to really change the game by massive magnitudes.

Where did you get 2^96 from?

I've seen that number somewhere too

That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.

Well, you can extrapolate the increase of hashing power or power used to calculate Bitcoin addresses (effectively hashing, yeah) pretty easily and more or less reliably, though. The limits of those file systems were also due to certain limitations that made sense at that time.

I just tried out my pc a few seconds. How many minutes does it take to generate 1 GB of valid addresses? And if i import them, how big should i expect my wallet file to be? I have a free 4 TB drive and would like to test this out.

4 TB ~= 4,000,000,000,000 Byte = 32,000,000,000,000 Bit. If you only store the addresses (thus, know which ones you've generated in a reasonable amount of time) and there are 2^160 possible addresses: 32,000,000,000,000 / 160 = 200,000,000,000 Addresses. Not that much.

Well, there are still ~2^256 possible private keys, or 2^96 private keys per address(according to the forum), anyone attempting this better have a whole galaxy of those Superman data crystals, in addition to a quantum computer + time machine.

Its the same problem, breaking a specific address is impossible with current equipment and in the foreseeable future.

If you're interested, you might try breaking 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr for a start.

correct me if I'm wrong but that doesn't mean there's necessarily 2^96 private keys available for any given address, it's just an average based on 2^256 divided by 2^160.

 anyway this number 2^96 isn't useful since there's no way to know which is the set of 2^96.  brute force by generating private keys would require searching all 2^256.  brute forcing by generating addresses would require 2^160 tries... and brute forcing the ECDSA based on a known public key would require 2^128 operations.

before generate all bitcoin adresses in one 1000 years you can mine all bitcoin+altcoins with that power in 0.0001 seconde