Vanitygen: Vanity bitcoin address generator/miner [v0.22]

[Jude Austin]

Does anyone know if the vanity pool website is still operational and paying for solving various work? Is it legit? i thought i read a thread a while back that it was stealing private keys or something? Or was this a different website? i dont want to spend weeks crunching a vanity address only to not get paid for it.

The owner of the vanity pool is on this forum, shoot him a message.

[apofis]

how to run two cards in one terminal

[LoyceV]

Does anyone know if the vanity pool website is still operational and paying for solving various work? Is it legit? i thought i read a thread a while back that it was stealing private keys or something? Or was this a different website?

The pool is not stealing anything, it uses split keys.
The one that's stealing addresses is also advertising it big in his signature on bitcointalk. He mainly posts in threads that don't show his -8 Red Trust, so he is probably still making new victims up to now. (I think it would be good if bitcointalk shows Trust-ratings in all topics).

if you are unlucky, it can take 6.2 years.

If you're unlucky, you may never find it!

[helloeverybody]

Does anyone know if the vanity pool website is still operational and paying for solving various work? Is it legit? i thought i read a thread a while back that it was stealing private keys or something? Or was this a different website?

The pool is not stealing anything, it uses split keys.
The one that's stealing addresses is also advertising it big in his signature on bitcointalk. He mainly posts in threads that don't show his -8 Red Trust, so he is probably still making new victims up to now. (I think it would be good if bitcointalk shows Trust-ratings in all topics).

if you are unlucky, it can take 6.2 years.

If you're unlucky, you may never find it!

I think it would probably be in the interest of the community if you just called him out.  If he s scamming then it's best everyone knows.  Im not too sure who it is unless i Stumble across a thread with him in it.

[DarkStar_]

Does anyone know if the vanity pool website is still operational and paying for solving various work? Is it legit? i thought i read a thread a while back that it was stealing private keys or something? Or was this a different website?

The pool is not stealing anything, it uses split keys.
The one that's stealing addresses is also advertising it big in his signature on bitcointalk. He mainly posts in threads that don't show his -8 Red Trust, so he is probably still making new victims up to now. (I think it would be good if bitcointalk shows Trust-ratings in all topics).

if you are unlucky, it can take 6.2 years.

If you're unlucky, you may never find it!

I think it would probably be in the interest of the community if you just called him out.  If he s scamming then it's best everyone knows.  Im not too sure who it is unless i Stumble across a thread with him in it.

Be Aware - The site linked right under this is a SCAM! Do NOT use.
This is the scam website: bitcoinvanitygen (dot) com They keep your private keys and will steal your funds after reaching a certain amount, I believe. A bunch of people have been scammed, but I'm not sure which user it is. I guess LoyceV was afraid someone who is new would fall for it, if the link was posted here.

It will take 3.1 years to reach 50% of the required work.

However, if you are lucky, it can take a shorter time, if you are unlucky, it can take 6.2 years.

There are discussions within this thread about the "luck" factor.  Feel free to ask questions.

Isn't the required work not linear? I remember reading that if it take 3.1 years to reach 50%, it would take an extra 3.1 years to reach 75%.

[apofis]

I have 20 HD5850-HD7950, how can I merge in the pool, quickly find a beautiful bitcoin address

[Timelord2067]

It will take 3.1 years to reach 50% of the required work.

However, if you are lucky, it can take a shorter time, if you are unlucky, it can take 6.2 years.

There are discussions within this thread about the "luck" factor.  Feel free to ask questions.

Isn't the required work not linear? I remember reading that if it take 3.1 years to reach 50%, it would take an extra 3.1 years to reach 75%.

Which is why I did *not* say that maximum length of time would be ... years.

I'd like to think if you got to 75% after 6.2 years you were a tad on the unlucky side.

[HCP]

I have 20 HD5850-HD7950, how can I merge in the pool, quickly find a beautiful bitcoin address

By reading the instructions for oclvanityminer in the OP of this thread and at the vanitypool website FAQ... It is pretty straightforward. oclvanityminer is just a commandline app, and has options that allow you to run multiple threads across multiple devices etc... The most basic being:

Code:

oclvanityminer -u https://vanitypool.appspot.com/ -a yourBitcoinAddressForPaymentGoesHere

It will connect to vanitypool, select the "best" bounty from those available and start working on it. AFAIK, you cannot select a specific task to work on from the pool.


Whether it is currently worth it is a different question. The bounties currently on offer are fairly low for the amount of work required. Most of them are 8+ char patterns with ridiculous difficulty with estimated times measured in years... although, with 20 GPUs at your disposal, you might do better

[sorryforthat]

I have 20 HD5850-HD7950, how can I merge in the pool, quickly find a beautiful bitcoin address

I would run my .bat with something along the lines of

Code:

oclvanityminer.exe -u https://vanitypool.appspot.com/ -a yourBitcoinAddressForPaymentGoesHere
pause

*put in your information of course or else you get an error

This should get you a list of you devices.

Then you need to determine what devices you would like to use and set up your .bat

Code:

oclvanityminer.exe -u https://vanitypool.appspot.com/ -a yourBitcoinAddressForPaymentGoesHere -D 1:0 -D 2:0 -D 3:0
pause

*your device string may be different, but you should see what im talking about.

[deisik]

Is it possible to run vanitygen across a few boxes (in a "cluster mode") to speed up address generation? I remember there were projects (patches to Linux kernel) aiming at building a cluster from a bunch of regular PCs (e.g. MOSIX and OpenMOSIX)...

Could they help make vanitygen run faster?

[LoyceV]

Is it possible to run vanitygen across a few boxes (in a "cluster mode") to speed up address generation?

It's a lot like mining: if you double your processing power, you'll find twice as many blocks/addresses.
Vanitygen searches at random, so if you were to start it on 10 different computers, they all search different addresses.
You can look at it as trying to roll a 6 on a dice. If you throw 2 dice at once, chances you hit it go up! If you throw 20 dice, it becomes very likely to hit it very fast.

[PhilPrime]

maybe i will try this. what is the minimum gpu requirements to use this application.?
i want to find my own prefix for my vanity address.. is it too much power consumption?

[deisik]

Is it possible to run vanitygen across a few boxes (in a "cluster mode") to speed up address generation?

It's a lot like mining: if you double your processing power, you'll find twice as many blocks/addresses.
Vanitygen searches at random, so if you were to start it on 10 different computers, they all search different addresses.
You can look at it as trying to roll a 6 on a dice. If you throw 2 dice at once, chances you hit it go up! If you throw 20 dice, it becomes very likely to hit it very fast.

I got your point, though I didn't mean that. It seems valid but I'm still not sure if simply running many instances of vanitygen in search of a random address is not worse (time wise) than running only one instance in search of just one address with a given prefix (in both cases) using that much processing power. Indeed, the program itself may be built in such a way that it won't make any difference, but can it still be made different if programmed specifically for massively-parallel execution?

I'm not very versed in Bitcoin technology internals, so I pretty much don't know and don't claim anything (just in case)

[Shiroslullaby]

Maybe this has been answered before, but do all the vanity addresses start with "1"?
(All the examples I've seen posted start this way, and I'm wondering if there is a reason for this.)

[xhomerx10]

Maybe this has been answered before, but do all the vanity addresses start with "1"?
(All the examples I've seen posted start this way, and I'm wondering if there is a reason for this.)

 Yes they all start with one.  Read this as it's too dicfficult to paste a table.

[Shiroslullaby]

LOL you know its funny, I've looked at so many BTC addresses before,
and I don't think I ever realized they all started with "1"!

I appreciate the link about the leading symbols.
It makes sense to have a character that designates they type of info we are looking at now that I think about it.

[deisik]

LOL you know its funny, I've looked at so many BTC addresses before,
and I don't think I ever realized they all started with "1"!

Not all of them start with 1. For example, CoinsBank Bitcoin addresses start with 3. As I got it, only addies generated with vanitygen start with 1

[xhomerx10]

LOL you know its funny, I've looked at so many BTC addresses before,
and I don't think I ever realized they all started with "1"!

Not all of them start with 1. For example, CoinsBank Bitcoin addresses start with 3. As I got it, only addies generated with vanitygen start with 1

 Not only vanity addresses. The most common Bitcoin address is the P2PKH (Pay-to-Pub-Key-Hash) begins with 1.
The addresses beginning with 3 are a special multi-signature format created from 3 or more private keys called P2SH (Pay-to-Script-Hash)
Conceivably, one could create multi-sig vanity addresses but I don't know of any available software.

[achow101]

LOL you know its funny, I've looked at so many BTC addresses before,
and I don't think I ever realized they all started with "1"!

Not all of them start with 1. For example, CoinsBank Bitcoin addresses start with 3. As I got it, only addies generated with vanitygen start with 1

Bitcoin addresses either start with 1 or 3, doesn't matter who generates them. The addresses that start with 3 are p2sh addresses (aka multisig addresses). The addresses that start with 1 are normal one key addresses. There are produced by all wallets.

[HCP]

Yeah... in general, most of the 3's are from web wallets, where you don't own the private keys... places like Xapo, Coinbase etc...  and the 1's are your typical one private key per address type wallets from your desktop/mobile/brain/paper wallets etc...

Having said that, some web wallets (like old blockchain.info) where you had the private keys were 1's... and some of the nonweb wallets that support multisig will generate 3's... so you can't really say 100% what sort of wallet generated any particular address...

The 1 and 3 certainly has nothing to do with vanity or not.