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

[Jude Austin]

I have a custom build of vanitygen that allows 40 characters but the odds are 10^36 power of finding said address.

It's just not feasible due to entropy and if it was Bitcoin would be so very flawed and everyones wallets would be empty.

But if you want to tip me, I will give you the build.

Wait—what am I missing?  An old-style Bitcoin address can’t be more than 35 characters long, including the checksum.

Moreover, odds would be much worse than 10^-36.  Picking a prefix which includes the everything but the checksum, that sounds like bruteforcing through the whole search space of a Hash160, making for about 10^-48 odds on each try.  If a “prefix” is picked which includes a checksum not matching the rest, then the odds are exactly zero.  If a “prefix” is picked which exceeds the maximal length of a Bitcoin address, then the odds are exactly zero.

Or did I mistake something obvious here?

Guys. I just need the programm. Don't tell me please "possible/impossible". I know that programmers can easily remove this limit. I'll pay a tip  

Take a maths class.  Seriously.

I just reiterated the statement without really paying attention. I have a custom build that will allow you to enter a full bitcoin address.

I thought the odds were 1:10^38 power because of Hash160, I don't know I'm no math genius.

The funny thing about entropy is that he could start it and it could find that address the first run. What are the odds then? Never 0. The only way the odds could be 0 is if what he was looking for didn't exist at all.

I say the odds aren't 0 because I know exactly what he is trying to do, bruteforce an existing address like: 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF

I tried it myself, hence why I have the modified version of vanitygen.

Thanks,
Jude

[LoyceV]

The funny thing about entropy is that he could start it and it could find that address the first run. What are the odds then? Never 0. The only way the odds could be 0 is if what he was looking for didn't exist at all.

I say the odds aren't 0 because I know exactly what he is trying to do, bruteforce an existing address like: 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF

I tried it myself, hence why I have the modified version of vanitygen.

Why don't you try to find the next Bitcoin block instead of trying to brute-force a private key? There's 12.5BTC waiting for you if you find one, and you may actually stand a chance!
You have a better chance of winning the lottery 4 times in a row, than brute-forcing a (properly generated) Bitcoin private key.

[Jude Austin]

The funny thing about entropy is that he could start it and it could find that address the first run. What are the odds then? Never 0. The only way the odds could be 0 is if what he was looking for didn't exist at all.

I say the odds aren't 0 because I know exactly what he is trying to do, bruteforce an existing address like: 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF

I tried it myself, hence why I have the modified version of vanitygen.

Why don't you try to find the next Bitcoin block instead of trying to brute-force a private key? There's 12.5BTC waiting for you if you find one, and you may actually stand a chance!
You have a better chance of winning the lottery 4 times in a row, than brute-forcing a (properly generated) Bitcoin private key.

Keyword, TRIED, I am no longer chasing that pipe dream, haha.

[nullius]

I thought the odds were 1:10^38 power because of Hash160, I don't know I'm no math genius.

2¹⁶⁰ > 10⁴⁸

The funny thing about entropy is that he could start it and it could find that address the first run. What are the odds then? Never 0. The only way the odds could be 0 is if what he was looking for didn't exist at all.

Theoreticians use terms such as “negligible probability” and dislike the term “impossible”.  This becomes a real problem when their words collide with non-theoreticians.  It has happened that a man was killed by a flying fire hydrant.  It has never happened that somebody got lucky in a 2¹⁶⁰ search space after trillions of tries, let alone one try—never happened, and for practical purposes, never will.  You should properly consider such a thing to be impossible.

Moreover, as I said, bruteforcing an address with a mismatch between the Hash160 and the checksum has a theoretical probability of zero.  Absolutely zero.  Because it’s an invalid address.  Would you say that the probability is nonzero of bruteforcing an address with a capital letter I, etc.?

Why don't you try to find the next Bitcoin block instead of trying to brute-force a private key? There's 12.5BTC waiting for you if you find one, and you may actually stand a chance!

It takes all miners in the world together 10 minutes on average to find a block.  Back of the envelope, at a rate of 8 Eh/s, it should take all miners in the entire world together over five billion trillion years to do 2¹⁶⁰ work.  (That’s with ASICs which only do SHA-256.)  I’ve been talking in Dev & Tech about how 2¹²⁸ work is humanly impossible, and always will be—forever.  It’s what I call “boil the oceans” security, because the energy required would do that and worse.  2¹⁶⁰ is more than four billion times more work.

Keyword, TRIED, I am no longer chasing that pipe dream, haha.

Better idea.

[Jude Austin]

I thought the odds were 1:10^38 power because of Hash160, I don't know I'm no math genius.

2¹⁶⁰ > 10⁴⁸

The funny thing about entropy is that he could start it and it could find that address the first run. What are the odds then? Never 0. The only way the odds could be 0 is if what he was looking for didn't exist at all.

Theoreticians use terms such as “negligible probability” and dislike the term “impossible”.  This becomes a real problem when their words collide with non-theoreticians.  It has happened that a man was killed by a flying fire hydrant.  It has never happened that somebody got lucky in a 2¹⁶⁰ search space after trillions of tries, let alone one try—never happened, and for practical purposes, never will.  You should properly consider such a thing to be impossible.

Moreover, as I said, bruteforcing an address with a mismatch between the Hash160 and the checksum has a theoretical probability of zero.  Absolutely zero.  Because it’s an invalid address.  Would you say that the probability is nonzero of bruteforcing an address with a capital letter I, etc.?

Why don't you try to find the next Bitcoin block instead of trying to brute-force a private key? There's 12.5BTC waiting for you if you find one, and you may actually stand a chance!

It takes all miners in the world together 10 minutes on average to find a block.  Back of the envelope, at a rate of 8 Eh/s, it should take all miners in the entire world together over five billion trillion years to do 2¹⁶⁰ work.  (That’s with ASICs which only do SHA-256.)  I’ve been talking in Dev & Tech about how 2¹²⁸ work is humanly impossible, and always will be—forever.  It’s what I call “boil the oceans” security, because the energy required would do that and worse.  2¹⁶⁰ is more than four billion times more work.

Keyword, TRIED, I am no longer chasing that pipe dream, haha.

Better idea.

As I said, no math genius. Quite retarded actually.

As for the mismatch, you know damn well he is going to copy and paste an existing address with coins on it. The probability of him pasting something else is 0. Why else would he want this?

As for security, you will shit your pants, on btckey.space I found an address with funds, tho it was a small amount (transaction fee) it was completely random.

In terms of linear generation starting from 1 to 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336 Bitcoin addresses, I agree with you.

In terms of randomly searching between 1 and 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336, I don't agree.

I found a collision so I can't agree with you, your statement itself is theoretical, how can you bash theory?

I believe by using entropy then it is more feasible. "Fight fire with fire"

[DannyHamilton]

As for security, you will shit your pants, on btckey.space I found an address with funds, tho it was a small amount (transaction fee) it was completely random.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

I suspect two possibilities:

1.  Neither the address, nor your search were properly random.

2. You are lying.

[Jude Austin]

As for security, you will shit your pants, on btckey.space I found an address with funds, tho it was a small amount (transaction fee) it was completely random.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

I suspect two possibilities:

1.  Neither the address, nor your search were properly random.

2. You are lying.

I have no reason to lie about it. It doesn't benefit me to lie about finding a collision.

Here is the address: 1EJvrRrgEAtAHx2dfVUh1NBresW1CJ9RHP

I have the page number saved and I haven't moved the funds because I am keeping it like a trophy. I can sign a message with the address. Still doesn't prove shit because I could have owned this address before.

The hardest part of proving a collision is everyone's doubt. It's not impossible. I've done it. How can I prove it? I can't without trust that I am not trying to alter your mind with a lie.

How does one prove the "impossible" when the majority says otherwise? Odds are not in my favor.

[nullius]

I have no reason to lie about it. It doesn't benefit me to lie about finding a collision.

There needn’t be any material motive.  Some people enjoy claiming to have done things declared impossible by mathematicians or physicists, as an end in itself.  A few of them put on hoaxes so elaborate, so meticulously executed, that one wonders what they might have achieved if their energies were otherwise spent.  But most are varying degrees of stupid and/or cracked.

Anyway, you seem to have missed that DannyHamilton conjectured another possibility—here put in boldface:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

I suspect two possibilities:

1.  Neither the address, nor your search were properly random.

2. You are lying.

It is not too unlikely that you made the same mistake in executing your “random” search as someone else did in generating keys to produce a “random” address—that you both introduced the same bias or nonuniformity.  There do tend to be both common conceptual errors in implementation, and common use of specific erroneous implementations.  Randomness is hard to get right.

I note you said upthread:

As I said, no math genius. Quite retarded actually.

So, maybe you made a mistake somewhere.

I have no way of knowing if that’s what happened here.  But as DannyHamilton said, it is a “possibility”.  By contrast, randomly hitting one of a relatively negligible number of targets uniformly distributed at random in a 2¹⁶⁰ search space may be safely excluded from the realm of all “possibility”.

It is true, however, that the likeliest possibility is lying.  Some guy on an Internet forum makes extraordinary claims which he freely admits he cannot prove “without trust” per below—what is the likeliest possibility?  Lying.  Of course.

How does one prove the "impossible" when the majority says otherwise? Odds are not in my favor.

It has nothing to do with “the majority”.  I don’t heed majorities.  The content of my brain is not a democracy, and not subject to a vote.

I am confident I know what the sum of 2+2 is.  I would not change my “opinion” of that sum even if I were the only person on Earth to have that “opinion”, or even if it were declared illegal.  So much for majorities.  Although I’m by no means a mathematical expert, I am also confident in my understanding of just how big a 2¹⁶⁰ search space is.  Even if you were to randomly scatter a seemingly large number of potential targets (keys for all addresses controlling funds) throughout that space, the space itself is so vast that it would swallow them without a trace.  Unless, that is, a bunch of targets wound up clumped in a tiny portion of that space.  There are various ways to severely restrict the search space, directly or indirectly or both:  Bad randomness generators, brainwallets, etc., etc.

(N.b. that this is a problem very different than that of finding vanity addresses.  It’s really offtopic in this thread.)

The hardest part of proving a collision is everyone's doubt. It's not impossible. I've done it. How can I prove it? I can't without trust that I am not trying to alter your mind with a lie.

Well, if you can’t prove it, then don’t expect for anybody to believe you.  Is that a problem?  Do you believe extraordinary claims posted on Internet forums, just because some guy said so?  —Just because he seemed to sincerely believe what he was saying, and even explicitly said that he had “no reason to lie about it”?  If you do, I could easily find you a forum loaded with alien abduction experiences, religious miracle testimony, Bigfoot sightings, etc.  Soon, you would believe all sorts of fascinating claims.

What it really boils down to is this:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

You made a positive assertion, which you readily admit you can’t prove “without trust” (as quoted above).  This is a scientific question, not a religious topic or a matter of personal taste.  The burden is on you to provide extraordinary proof of your extraordinary claim, if you want for anybody to take it seriously.  I don’t need to explain and explore possibilities of what might really have happened; I have done these things because up to a limited point, I find the discussion to be interesting to me and an educational opportunity for readers (you and otherwise).  Absent any new and extraordinary information, I think that limited point has now been reached.

If you can’t prove what you say, it’s no big deal; I will more or less just shrug and move on.  “Some guy on the Internet said X.”  I will not exactly “shit [my] pants” as you said, nor will I lose any sleep wondering about it or worrying about Bitcoin security.  I know the numbers.  Numbers don’t even know how to lie.  Numbers don’t make mistakes.


Side note, mentioned for the sake of correctness:

As for security, you will shit your pants, on btckey.space I found an address with funds, tho it was a small amount (transaction fee) it was completely random.

An address can’t have a transaction fee in it.  Fees aren’t paid to an address; they’re the part of a transaction’s outputs not paid to an address, and spendable by the miner of a block.

[aarons6]

As for security, you will shit your pants, on btckey.space I found an address with funds, tho it was a small amount (transaction fee) it was completely random.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

I suspect two possibilities:

1.  Neither the address, nor your search were properly random.

2. You are lying.

I have no reason to lie about it. It doesn't benefit me to lie about finding a collision.

Here is the address: 1EJvrRrgEAtAHx2dfVUh1NBresW1CJ9RHP

I have the page number saved and I haven't moved the funds because I am keeping it like a trophy. I can sign a message with the address. Still doesn't prove shit because I could have owned this address before.

The hardest part of proving a collision is everyone's doubt. It's not impossible. I've done it. How can I prove it? I can't without trust that I am not trying to alter your mind with a lie.

How does one prove the "impossible" when the majority says otherwise? Odds are not in my favor.

actually i believe address collisions happen all the time and are more common then people think.. the issue is MOST addresses are unused.. so if you search through a bunch for a vanity you still dont use the ones you didnt want..

[Jude Austin]

I have no reason to lie about it. It doesn't benefit me to lie about finding a collision.

There needn’t be any material motive.  Some people enjoy claiming to have done things declared impossible by mathematicians or physicists, as an end in itself.  A few of them put on hoaxes so elaborate, so meticulously executed, that one wonders what they might have achieved if their energies were otherwise spent.  But most are varying degrees of stupid and/or cracked.

Anyway, you seem to have missed that DannyHamilton conjectured another possibility—here put in boldface:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

I suspect two possibilities:

1.  Neither the address, nor your search were properly random.

2. You are lying.

It is not too unlikely that you made the same mistake in executing your “random” search as someone else did in generating keys to produce a “random” address—that you both introduced the same bias or nonuniformity.  There do tend to be both common conceptual errors in implementation, and common use of specific erroneous implementations.  Randomness is hard to get right.

I note you said upthread:

As I said, no math genius. Quite retarded actually.

So, maybe you made a mistake somewhere.

I have no way of knowing if that’s what happened here.  But as DannyHamilton said, it is a “possibility”.  By contrast, randomly hitting one of a relatively negligible number of targets uniformly distributed at random in a 2¹⁶⁰ search space may be safely excluded from the realm of all “possibility”.

It is true, however, that the likeliest possibility is lying.  Some guy on an Internet forum makes extraordinary claims which he freely admits he cannot prove “without trust” per below—what is the likeliest possibility?  Lying.  Of course.

How does one prove the "impossible" when the majority says otherwise? Odds are not in my favor.

It has nothing to do with “the majority”.  I don’t heed majorities.  The content of my brain is not a democracy, and not subject to a vote.

I am confident I know what the sum of 2+2 is.  I would not change my “opinion” of that sum even if I were the only person on Earth to have that “opinion”, or even if it were declared illegal.  So much for majorities.  Although I’m by no means a mathematical expert, I am also confident in my understanding of just how big a 2¹⁶⁰ search space is.  Even if you were to randomly scatter a seemingly large number of potential targets (keys for all addresses controlling funds) throughout that space, the space itself is so vast that it would swallow them without a trace.  Unless, that is, a bunch of targets wound up clumped in a tiny portion of that space.  There are various ways to severely restrict the search space, directly or indirectly or both:  Bad randomness generators, brainwallets, etc., etc.

(N.b. that this is a problem very different than that of finding vanity addresses.  It’s really offtopic in this thread.)

The hardest part of proving a collision is everyone's doubt. It's not impossible. I've done it. How can I prove it? I can't without trust that I am not trying to alter your mind with a lie.

Well, if you can’t prove it, then don’t expect for anybody to believe you.  Is that a problem?  Do you believe extraordinary claims posted on Internet forums, just because some guy said so?  —Just because he seemed to sincerely believe what he was saying, and even explicitly said that he had “no reason to lie about it”?  If you do, I could easily find you a forum loaded with alien abduction experiences, religious miracle testimony, Bigfoot sightings, etc.  Soon, you would believe all sorts of fascinating claims.

What it really boils down to is this:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

You made a positive assertion, which you readily admit you can’t prove “without trust” (as quoted above).  This is a scientific question, not a religious topic or a matter of personal taste.  The burden is on you to provide extraordinary proof of your extraordinary claim, if you want for anybody to take it seriously.  I don’t need to explain and explore possibilities of what might really have happened; I have done these things because up to a limited point, I find the discussion to be interesting to me and an educational opportunity for readers (you and otherwise).  Absent any new and extraordinary information, I think that limited point has now been reached.

If you can’t prove what you say, it’s no big deal; I will more or less just shrug and move on.  “Some guy on the Internet said X.”  I will not exactly “shit [my] pants” as you said, nor will I lose any sleep wondering about it or worrying about Bitcoin security.  I know the numbers.  Numbers don’t even know how to lie.  Numbers don’t make mistakes.


Side note, mentioned for the sake of correctness:

As for security, you will shit your pants, on btckey.space I found an address with funds, tho it was a small amount (transaction fee) it was completely random.

An address can’t have a transaction fee in it.  Fees aren’t paid to an address; they’re the part of a transaction’s outputs not paid to an address, and spendable by the miner of a block.

That's just the problem, how do I prove it? Tell me exactly how I can prove it.

Without everyone in denial watching me as I clicked next on the page until it popped up and said I found a balance. I have no way to actually prove it, like I said I could have owned that address forever.

Unless I found an address with a significant amount of coins that was dormant for a while I can't really prove it.

I'm not necessarily trying to go against the mathematicians or physicist, I am not that retarded.

All I am saying is have some faith, just because the odds of something happening are mathematically 0, if the possibility exists then it's NOT impossible.

The only thing I have to defend is my reputation. Why can't you open your mind and believe?

This isn't a personal attack on you, or the Bitcoin network, mathematics, physics, theory, etc but because I go against your logic I am a liar, amazing.

What's more entertaining is the fact that you keep this conversation going, if I am a liar and I can't prove it and it didn't happen, why continue to explain yourself? Clearly I am a lying nut job, do you typically defend yourself against people like me?

How about this, you prove that I am lying...if I have more evidence than you can provide does that make me the victor? Regardless, I found an address, randomly.

I don't even want to be victorious, this isn't a competition, just someone who did what you think is impossible.

[nullius]

I found the following amidst discussion of your very own clone of directory.io (!):

On a legit note, I was bored as shit sitting in this hotel room as I travel for work.

I found an address with exactly the miner fee by randomly searching http://btckey.space. I instantly ran down to the "news station" (What the UK calls a convenience store) and bought two scratch off lottery tickets, I didn't win, haha.

But I did stumble on an address with a balance...out of all these years....

You have better luck winning the lottery then getting struck by lightening, but it's not impossible.

I was randomly entering numbers in the URL and found an address with a very small balance (Miner fee). I didn't move the funds but it blew my mind I actually landed on something.

So, this was from randomly entering numbers by hand into the URL bar of your browser?  (Allegedly.)

Uh-huh.

By the way, I see that you run LBC (and vehemently defend it).  Have you seen rico666’s trust feedback?  I wouldn’t trust anything executable from that guy on my machines.  Just saying.

<snip big quotes>

That's just the problem, how do I prove it? Tell me exactly how I can prove it.

How it actually works:  If you want to prove your own positive assertion, that’s up to you, not me.  Exponentiate this rule when you literally claim to have done the impossible, and thus proved its possibility (with your web browser URL bar, no less).

(I might speculate on how the biases involved in mashing numbers into a URL bar could find you a key which was produced nonrandomly.  I had been leaning toward DannyHamilton’s hypothesis #1.  But the following (plus much of the context) conclusively persuaded me that #2, you’re lying.)

have some faith

Why can't you open your mind and believe?

Thanks, got it.  I have my own cult; I don’t need yours.

We are now far outside technical discussion and deep in kook territory.  I’m not interested in that, and neither am I interested in (further) derailing the Vanitygen thread.  Please leave this thread to discussion of Vanitygen and the generation of vanity addresses.


Edit to add—somehow, I’d missed this post:

actually i believe address collisions happen all the time and are more common then people think.. the issue is MOST addresses are unused.. so if you search through a bunch for a vanity you still dont use the ones you didnt want..

Really, “all the time”?  You “believe”?  Without numbers, that’s an empty (and wildly absurd) proposition; and the numbers will not support you there.  2¹⁶⁰ is so much bigger than you think (or “believe”) it is, that what I just said is an understatement.

Anyway, this is still off-topic for the Vanitygen thread.  If (if) you can demonstrate that “address collisions happen all the time and are more common then [sic] people think” using numbers rather than beliefs, please open a new topic in Development & Technical Discussion.  I’d be fascinated to see that.  I won’t hold my breath.

[Jude Austin]

I found the following amidst discussion of your very own clone of directory.io (!):

On a legit note, I was bored as shit sitting in this hotel room as I travel for work.

I found an address with exactly the miner fee by randomly searching http://btckey.space. I instantly ran down to the "news station" (What the UK calls a convenience store) and bought two scratch off lottery tickets, I didn't win, haha.

But I did stumble on an address with a balance...out of all these years....

You have better luck winning the lottery then getting struck by lightening, but it's not impossible.

I was randomly entering numbers in the URL and found an address with a very small balance (Miner fee). I didn't move the funds but it blew my mind I actually landed on something.

So, this was from randomly entering numbers by hand into the URL bar of your browser?  (Allegedly.)

Uh-huh.

By the way, I see that you run LBC (and vehemently defend it).  Have you seen rico666’s trust feedback?  I wouldn’t trust anything executable from that guy on my machines.  Just saying.

<snip big quotes>

That's just the problem, how do I prove it? Tell me exactly how I can prove it.

How it actually works:  If you want to prove your own positive assertion, that’s up to you, not me.  Exponentiate this rule when you literally claim to have done the impossible, and thus proved its possibility (with your web browser URL bar, no less).

(I might speculate on how the biases involved in mashing numbers into a URL bar could find you a key which was produced nonrandomly.  I had been leaning toward DannyHamilton’s hypothesis #1.  But the following (plus much of the context) conclusively persuaded me that #2, you’re lying.)

have some faith

Why can't you open your mind and believe?

Thanks, got it.  I have my own cult; I don’t need yours.

We are now far outside technical discussion and deep in kook territory.  I’m not interested in that, and neither am I interested in (further) derailing the Vanitygen thread.  Please leave this thread to discussion of Vanitygen and the generation of vanity addresses.


Edit to add—somehow, I’d missed this post:

actually i believe address collisions happen all the time and are more common then people think.. the issue is MOST addresses are unused.. so if you search through a bunch for a vanity you still dont use the ones you didnt want..

Really, “all the time”?  You “believe”?  Without numbers, that’s an empty (and wildly absurd) proposition; and the numbers will not support you there.  2¹⁶⁰ is so much bigger than you think (or “believe”) it is, that what I just said is an understatement.

Anyway, this is still off-topic for the Vanitygen thread.  If (if) you can demonstrate that “address collisions happen all the time and are more common then [sic] people think” using numbers rather than beliefs, please open a new topic in Development & Technical Discussion.  I’d be fascinated to see that.  I won’t hold my breath.

That's not what I did to find it. I generated a random number then I just kept clicking next and then deleting the last number off the URL no real rhythm, click click click, remove last number in URL,  click click, etc.

I have no reason to lie brother and I can't prove myself to not be a liar with this particular claim. You can't prove that you're right either. Does this make a collision theory? Can't be proven right or wrong. Although I found an address.

However, you are correct, this is not the thread for this conversation.

Yes, I did clone directory.io and added balances.
Yes, I participate in LBC.

I never denied any of that and surely that makes my claim even more deniable by association but the only way I could have found it is by being associated with the search.

I'll start a thread about my find, purely for entertainment. I would like if you joined in as you have. Danny Hamilton, you should join in also. I will be in Chicago soon, maybe we can get lunch or drinks or both. On my way home from Australia, probably lying about that too.

I could care less about Rico reputation, I am only associated with him by LBC and it runs on a junk dedicated I use to play with stuff.

P. S.

If you judge someone's character by their trust rating on a website then why don't you trust me?

[aarons6]

actually i believe address collisions happen all the time and are more common then people think.. the issue is MOST addresses are unused.. so if you search through a bunch for a vanity you still dont use the ones you didnt want..

Really, “all the time”?  You “believe”?  Without numbers, that’s an empty (and wildly absurd) proposition; and the numbers will not support you there.  2¹⁶⁰ is so much bigger than you think (or “believe”) it is, that what I just said is an understatement.

Anyway, this is still off-topic for the Vanitygen thread.  If (if) you can demonstrate that “address collisions happen all the time and are more common then [sic] people think” using numbers rather than beliefs, please open a new topic in Development & Technical Discussion.  I’d be fascinated to see that.  I won’t hold my breath.

when you run vanitygen you are sifting through millions of keys a second.. who is to say you arent finding keys someone else has. unless you check everyone for a tx you would never know..

altho, right now the odds of you finding a key that is used is slim to none.. but its still possible.. i do believe as bitcoin address get more used the possibility will go up..

[BreakingBAD]

I got this error:

cc -ggdb -O3 -Wall   -c -o vanitygen.o vanitygen.c
vanitygen.c:26:25: fatal error: openssl/sha.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
<builtin>: recipe for target 'vanitygen.o' failed
make: *** [vanitygen.o] Error 1

How can I fix it?

[K1773R]

I got this error:

cc -ggdb -O3 -Wall   -c -o vanitygen.o vanitygen.c
vanitygen.c:26:25: fatal error: openssl/sha.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
<builtin>: recipe for target 'vanitygen.o' failed
make: *** [vanitygen.o] Error 1

How can I fix it?

install openssl headers.

[dooglus]

Here is the address: 1EJvrRrgEAtAHx2dfVUh1NBresW1CJ9RHP

I have the page number saved and I haven't moved the funds because I am keeping it like a trophy.

How many digits long is the page number? There are 1.80925e+75 pages. I'm guessing that you picked a page incredibly near to the start, relative to the number of pages that exist.

[tolstolob]

Can the latest version (v0.22) make compressed keys? The ones that start with Letters and not 5 for the private key part. Sure I can convert it, but I'd want to generate a few hundred compressed keys (offline) for cold storage.

[nullius]

A day or two ago, I whipped up a quickie Segwit address generator with a simple regex search.  It can produce both P2WPKH-nested-in-P2SH and Bech32 addresses.  It’s quite trivial; it lacks vanitygen’s features, and probably also falls short in performance.

Please see and followup-to:  segvan: Segwit vanity address & bulk address generator

Github: https://github.com/nym-zone/segvan

Some sample outputs from short patterns:

3NULL3ZCUXr7RDLxXeLPDMZDZYxuaYkCnG  (^3NULL[0-9])

bc1qcash96s5jqppzsp8hy8swkggf7f6agex98an7h (hahah; ^bc1qcash[0-9])

More recent gems, my new tip addresses:

bc1qnullnymefa273hgss63kvtvr0q7377kjza0607

35segwitgLKnDi2kn7unNdETrZzHD2c5xh

[nullius]

Can the latest version (v0.22) make compressed keys?

segvan only produces compressed keys.  It does have an option I added at the last minute for old-style “1” addresses.  However, its primary function is to produce Segwit addresses (both Bech32 and “3”-nested), which require compressed keys.  You should be using Segwit, anyway; it will save you significantly on fees.

[AlBoKa]

Just for  Information:

My Vega 64 water cooled edition does 174million keys per second:) its rly fast!