Hello,
I have been using a vanity generator (Silver Thread Software LLC) for the past week in order to get my name in my btc address. It is brutal+ process to find the private key and may take months or even years to crack it with a cpu. But here is the thought: with unlimited power and time it is possible to generate a private key that corresponds to an existing 34 character public key? I believe this is far from happening at the present day due to the computational power required for the task but recent development in quantum computers and machine learning may be a step.
Anyways, for all other newbies this a great way to give your bitcoin address a little more customization and if any more experienced users find this interesting please leave your feedback and thoughts (statistical data and estimates would be appreciated). I could not post this in relative threads due to my restrictions but then again everyone else is talking about teh exaflop and mining so I hope this is useful.
Thanks!
http://silverthreadsoftware.com/bitcoin/vanity/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=201800.0