First, vanity addresses are a bad idea since they encourage address reuse, see my previous post.

Second, the hashing operation for mining is different than the hashing operation for generating vanity addresses.

Third, the hashing of the public key is only part of the time consuming operations needed to generate a vanity address.  Generation of a vanity address also involves: random private key generation, calculating the public key from the private key, base conversion, and finally regular expression matching.

None of this can be done by an ASIC designed specifically for Bitcoin mining.

So the answered is no.

Given a couple million dollars an ASIC could be designed and produced specifically for vanity address generation.  However this would be a huge loss as the market for long vanity addresses generation does not support the large NRE investment.

And to answer your next question, no, even with millions of state of the art ASICs all running 24/7 you could not generate a vanity address that was a full match to a known address so you could steal someone's BTC.

Receiving multiple transactions into a vanity address (or any address) does not pose a security risk but does pose a privacy risk.

Multiple sends from the vanity address (or any address) does reduce security since the first send from any address publishes the public key.

Address reuse of any kind poses a significant privacy risk not only to the address owner but to everyone doing transactions with the address owner.

Vanity addresses are very bad because they encourage address reuse, which reduces the overall privacy for the entire Bitcoin system.  Very few people, if any, create a vanity address in order to just use it one time.

Finally, address reuse poses a significant threat to the long term viability of Bitcoin because it poses a threat to the fungibility of Bitcoin.

I am curious.  Why did you restore your wallet from an old backup?

This is not a problem then.

No this is not possible because the tail value contains the checksum of the entire address.  To do a vanity address with the same head and tail is equivalent (for all practical purposes) to creating a vanity address for the entire address, which is not possible.

But as you said this is not a problem anyway.  They can just display the entire thing.  Sorry I brought it up but I was trying to think of why this might be "hard" for them to do.

Yes I also would prefer to hear this directly from the dev team.

It is just above in this post:
BTW sending a small amount does not fix this problem:

Assume the web site is under the control of the hacker.
You send a small amount to the address shown on the screen.
The amount shows up on the screen as received and even when you look on any block explorer.
This proves nothing.

It is not done, yet.
From one of the posts above.  This is being worked on and will be fixed in a future update.

So once the firmware update is done we should be able to verify the receiving addresses in the Trezor window before sending any BTC to the Trezor.

I was wondering if displaying the entire address is the problem.  I see two solutions:

1) It should be good enough to display the head 10 characters and tail 10 characters of the address (or something like that)
2) Just use the two buttons to scroll left and right through the address in the window.  That way it can be larger and easier to read.

A long time ago (pages ago) I also suggested that the Trezor interface be enhanced so that the web site could have a button next to each Bitcoin address that said "verify this address".  Pressing the button would cause the window on the Trezor to display the same address in the sequence that the web site is displaying.  The the user could verify the two are the same.

The only alt coins that may have a chance to become a possible contender to Bitcoin would be new alt coins that are actually much better than Bitcoin and uses this method for their initial coin distribution:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563925.0

Since there is not a single alt coin today that is better than Bitcoin and uses the method described in that thread all of them will fail.

Yes, all of them.

This is because the first alt coin to be better than Bitcoin and use that method will wipe out all the other alt coins.

I totally understand your frustration after 4 days.  I would be upset also.

When you deposit BTC at localbitcoins you basically loan the BTC to them and they then own the BTC seeing as they have the private keys for the BTC at that point.

There is nothing you can do, including passwords or 2FA, that would prevent them from stealing your BTC if that is what they have in mind.

Posting here is a good way to possibly bring their attention to the issue but I would not hold your breath.

I agree with you but, have you had your password changed?  If not, then your comment is not relevent to the current conversation.

And astronomy class

Travel to the nearby planets is totally possible in fact we have already sent and landed unmanned spacecraft there already.  Mars is totally within the reach of present day technology.  Very expensive but totally possible.

So let me get this straight:

Someone took over your localbitcoins account and changed your password?  Is that correct?

Since you cannot get into your localbitcoins account to see your balance I must assume you are just looking at the number of BTC being held at your input address.  Correct?

Bad news dude.  Those are not your BTC.

The hacker has already pulled the BTC you had loaned on account to localbitcoins out and they are probably gone.  You see, when you make a withdrawl from localbitcoins they take some other BTC and send them out.  Those BTC that still happen to be sitting at your input address are theirs and they will use them to pay someone else - not you.

I am sorry your account was hacked.  Hopefully you did not lose too much.  Hopefully you learned to use two factor authentication and a strong random password on all of your Bitcoin accounts.

Do you have any idea how the thief got your password?

I did read it.  And I don't dismiss it.

Your electric car analogy seems appropriate.

Electric cars have batteries that store energy.  The device in the articles also requires energy:  "The device (engine) requires an electrical power source to produce its reflecting internal microwaves but does not have any moving parts or require any reaction mass as fuel"

So, just like I said before, several times:  energy is being converted into motion.  But you still need an energy source.

Maybe you and I are in violent agreement here as opposed to some of the others in this thread that are claiming there is a new engine that gives you motion without input energy.

Your mad because his straw man exposed yours?  Let's get back to yours:

Please explain how a theoretical engine design that has been cussed and discussed for the last few decades "is a revolutionary idea, but not in the way people think" because I do not see how your discussion of the hadron collider and the morons etc. has anything to do with the discussion at hand.

Again, you could not be more wrong.

Nope.  Converting "empty space" to force (momentum) requires energy.  So, you are wrong.

By the way these two guys never answered my questions:

The only alt coins that may have a chance to become a possible contender to Bitcoin would be a new alt that is actually much better than Bitcoin and uses this method for its initial coin distribution:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=563925.0

In this post Peter may have singlehandedly killed off all past, current and future alts that do not use this method of initial coin distribution, including  Ethereum.  He is my new hero!

His post also has the potential of eliminating almost all of the incentive to make new alts for the "pump and dump of it" and reducing the entire alt space to serious condenders only.

If you want to know if any alt is going to succeed just ask these two questions:

    1) Is it better than Bitcoin in a market defining way?

    2) Does it implement the method of initial coin distribution suggested in that thread?

If the answer is yes to both questions then it has a chance of becoming something.

Here is an outline of the calculation:

Assume you want to create electron/positron pairs from the flux.
You calculate the mass of the electron + the mass of the positron.
Now the amount of time/distance an electron/positron pair can wink into and exist before it has to wink out again is given by the uncertainty principle formula.

From this time/distance we can calculate the minimum and average electric field between the pair during the time they exist.

So if we create an electric field over the vacuum greater than that then we can "rip them appart" during the very short time that they wink in.

As we rip apart these pairs we can create two particle streams:  one stream of electrons the other stream of positrons.  Then, all that is needed is to accelerate the two streams using more electric fields and then toss the two streams out the back of the ship.

As I have said before this process takes energy that has to come from somewhere.

To see the problems you run into let's take your example of the "cold fusion reactor".  If it worked how would it work?  Well by converting mass to energy - are you with me so far?

Now we take that energy that was created by converting some of the mass of our ship and use this method to convert the energy back to matter so we can throw it off the ship.

It would have been better to just throw the original matter off the ship in the first place.

Do you see what I am saying?

I studied this a bit in college and yes it should be possible to create a particle stream from the background quantum flux with a strong enough and dense enough electrical field.  In fact, at that time I did a quick back of the envelope calculation on the required electrical field.  Don't remember the answer but if I get some time I may redo the calculations.  The particle stream thus produced could then be thrown out the back of a space ship in order to propel it forward.

I talked to my professors about it and they said, sure that should work.

However, due to the laws of physics, specifically the conservation of energy/mass/momentum, the amount of energy needed to do this is rather large and has to come from somewhere.  So I can see a way to convert say sunlight into mass/momentum and orbit around a star (the source of energy for the engine) but if you are out between the stars you are screwed unless you cary a source of energy with you (nuclear perhaps?).

I don't really know why this is all being hyped as something new.  I figured this out in the junior year in my EE degree in 1983 and as my professors said at that time "that is a well know theoretical engine design".

Sounds like you have a plan.