vanity addresses question

[Qwedcxza1]

i saw somewhere else in the forum a post about mining pool for vanity addresses. is this done just by brute force until you hit a combination of letters that you want? if somebody mines a vanity address for you then won't they know the private key and the security will be compromised?

[cypher1024]

There's some fancy math involved, but the miner who finds your vanity address doesn't get the private key.

[Qwedcxza1]

any links to the fancy maths? i don't get how a miner can give you the ability to generate a private key if he doesn't have the ability to do it himself and might already have done it.

[Pzi4nk]

I haven't seen a "vanity" address. What would an example of that look like?

[Qwedcxza1]

i think yours might be something like Pzi4nknewbie8s878d578hwehj7hj76kxg6g

[JompinDox]

I haven't seen a "vanity" address. What would an example of that look like?

Look at mine for instance

[cypher1024]

any links to the fancy maths? i don't get how a miner can give you the ability to generate a private key if he doesn't have the ability to do it himself and might already have done it.

It's actually pretty cool.

From StackExchange:

Bitcoin addresses are created from ECDSA keypairs. Their property is that if you take two private keys and add them together (with appropriate modulo operations), the sum will map to a public key that is the same one as one would obtain by adding the two public keys corresponding to the private keys.

This means that in order to outsource vanity key generation, one can create an ECDSA keypair, store the private key safely, and give out the public key to other people. They would then proceed to generate ECDSA keypairs, summing the generated public keys to the one provided by you, and checking whether they map to the appropriate vanity address. If it does, they need only to give you the appropriate private key, which you then need to add to your secret private key in order to obtain the private key that maps itself to the vanity address.

[Pzi4nk]

i think yours might be something like Pzi4nknewbie8s878d578hwehj7hj76kxg6g

Gotcha. I was envisioning the whole string being customized. Thanks.

[Pzi4nk]

I haven't seen a "vanity" address. What would an example of that look like?

Look at mine for instance

I see. Thanks for pointing that out. Somewhat cool.

Kind of like when the first three letters of your randomly generated license plate number turns out to be your initials.

[Qwedcxza1]

any links to the fancy maths? i don't get how a miner can give you the ability to generate a private key if he doesn't have the ability to do it himself and might already have done it.

It's actually pretty cool.

From StackExchange:

Bitcoin addresses are created from ECDSA keypairs. Their property is that if you take two private keys and add them together (with appropriate modulo operations), the sum will map to a public key that is the same one as one would obtain by adding the two public keys corresponding to the private keys.

This means that in order to outsource vanity key generation, one can create an ECDSA keypair, store the private key safely, and give out the public key to other people. They would then proceed to generate ECDSA keypairs, summing the generated public keys to the one provided by you, and checking whether they map to the appropriate vanity address. If it does, they need only to give you the appropriate private key, which you then need to add to your secret private key in order to obtain the private key that maps itself to the vanity address.

that is pretty cool

[roozifus]

any links to the fancy maths? i don't get how a miner can give you the ability to generate a private key if he doesn't have the ability to do it himself and might already have done it.

It's actually pretty cool.

From StackExchange:

Bitcoin addresses are created from ECDSA keypairs. Their property is that if you take two private keys and add them together (with appropriate modulo operations), the sum will map to a public key that is the same one as one would obtain by adding the two public keys corresponding to the private keys.

This means that in order to outsource vanity key generation, one can create an ECDSA keypair, store the private key safely, and give out the public key to other people. They would then proceed to generate ECDSA keypairs, summing the generated public keys to the one provided by you, and checking whether they map to the appropriate vanity address. If it does, they need only to give you the appropriate private key, which you then need to add to your secret private key in order to obtain the private key that maps itself to the vanity address.

man i did two semesters of cryptography and it still trips me out sometimes :S

[robin0van0der0vliet]

i saw somewhere else in the forum a post about mining pool for vanity addresses. is this done just by brute force until you hit a combination of letters that you want? if somebody mines a vanity address for you then won't they know the private key and the security will be compromised?

Yes, it just brute forces it, I waited a night for mine vanity address (see signature).

[tiktoc]

There are two major topics on this in the technical and development forum if you want to read more about including information on the vanity pool.