Bitcoin Forum

Hello fellow early adopters, before the firstbits get too crowded with random addresses I thought I would try and generate some neat looking addresses:

1Nick1TvcJVcQ3szc3iQ48PLMCa8FBRHry
1Gary1Ph9opBpsf783Kwnbb6rwwYdjjJ1L
1Dream1r9nKmxg92csi6RTPqwGCbUX68Qc
1Crypt1CLFp4JesryfioeNx8r9HgoJqjSj

Ok, easy enough.  I have put the 1Crypt1 address into a wallet (on a secure computer) and I am using that as my Halloween tip jar this year. 

I am generating lots of other interesting addresses and I want to sell them.  I have two qualities for sale; those of the highest quality as seen above and those of low qulaity that have more than one numeral preceding the text and is mixed case.  I am not selling intermediate quality address because I want the nicest ones to have the best place on firstbits.com.

If you are interested, you can request that I include a word of your choice in my search and I will give you first dibs, or I can email you a ranked list of my best finds.  I can send you the hex DER key and or a fresh wallet that has the key already inserted if you want to buy one.

My biggest thanks go to the creator of VanityGen which seems to make it trivial to produce addresses like these.

I created 1NickMi6Vp1L6Z8pJmHpXPxFn3D4gqDLht in less than 1 minute... private key 5KY9ieLJ7h8AydJs7pJL56t9ZDkTyBGZr6v6qKYveLQSMNULTqR

Now when you get up into 6 and 7 characters, the difficult ones... different story.

This can't work. You will still have the private key of those addresses, which means you can spend any coins sent to them. You cannot sell an address, you can only share it, which hardly anybody would be interested in.

My code is much less efficient than his and it is much safer to generate these yourself, but I am selling mine for the people that can't do it themselves.  Which I imagine is most.

I will delete the private address once I zip it up to sell.  The Bitbills people do the same thing.  I assumed that was obvious.

Firstbits.com could allow pointing of the address to another, no?

A) I find 1NickABCD, and "1Nick" is the firstbits after I send 0.00001 btc to it.
B) Along comes Nick Smith who wants to buy 1Nick for 10BTC.
C) Nick Smith Generates 1NickXYZ... on his own and sends 0.0001 btc to it
D) I send the private keys of 1NickABCD to Firstbits and the pointer 1NickXYZ...
E) Transaction is complete, I get 10BTC

Private keys of 1NickABCD are then published on firstbits. Now 1NickXYZ... would show up at firstbits as "1Nick"

I don't understand.  I expect that future Bitcoin GUIs will have a firstbits type of process available.  Redirecting your firstbits search would cause too much confusion.  And why send your private key to firstbits?  So they can forward to your other address?  Ehh, I don't think anyone would use that.

Yeah, it would involve a central authority, which most won't go for. Trying to get around you spending coins intended for myself. Even if you were to destroy the private key after transfer, if there was ever a breach in a client's wallet, there would be doubt cast upon yourself.

For that matter, they could just claim that I stole their coins.  However, I doubt this will be much of an issue cause sane people would store only trivial amounts in their vanity address. 

... Then again, I would say that sane people don't keep their wallet in the default directory or 10,000 BTC on a networked computer.

I'm selling 18hrSeXxVPMHUVv6XC63zKWRf76nyVmohD for 2 BTC, it is on mybitcoin account

This can be done without possessing the private keys, actually.  The way it works is you generate a keypair, give the searcher the public part,  then the searcher looks for count of point additions needed to meet the required vanity hash value (this is same search which is currently done).  Then they report back to the requester the number of additions, and the requester combines that with their private key to get their new keypair securely.

Dunno if anyone will bother writing the fairly minor modification to make the tool handle this, plus the tool for making the request, anytime soon however. 

Now you can buy vanity addresses without compromising your security:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=84569