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

[paraipan]

I love my new address (Check sig)  

sent you some coins so you can use the firstbits  

@BurtWagner not necessarily, firstbits claims they add it to their database after a payment is made and it reaches 7 confirms

[BurtW]

I think it is worth mentioning to everyone you need to use your generated address in order to claim the firstbits location.

[runlinux]

its saying that all 4 of mine are not in the chain... I have moved a few coins to and from them last night. o well!

[Nyhm]

If you're using the bitcoin-qt wallet (from bitcoin.org), moving bitcoins between "accounts" in your wallet might be done locally (not on the block chain). Can anyone else confirm whether this is always the behavior when moving values within the wallet? Is there any way to tell bitcoin-qt to send the transaction to the network, even if you own the destination address (the wallet has the private key)?

[The00Dustin]

I'm pretty sure the transaction has to go to the network, otherwise there wouldn't be confirmations and the transaction wouldn't really have happened.  That having been said, I had coins go from one wallet to another and the address wasn't showing on firstbits.com several days later (this was a few months ago).  I think it is way behind.  Is the firstbits info on blockchain.info calculated the same way and accurate?

[K1773R]

If you're using the bitcoin-qt wallet (from bitcoin.org), moving bitcoins between "accounts" in your wallet might be done locally (not on the block chain). Can anyone else confirm whether this is always the behavior when moving values within the wallet? Is there any way to tell bitcoin-qt to send the transaction to the network, even if you own the destination address (the wallet has the private key)?

this dosnt hapen, if you send something to yourself one of your "hidden" adress is used to recieve the BTC and the amount of BTC isnt decrease. Thats because if you send something to yourself, u already know u will get that amount of BTC. you cant transfer anything locally because only transactions with valid inputs are getting accepted, if you just change the input who dosnt have enough BTC then it will fail. You have to tell the network that u send BTC to another adress otherwise the money is lost (you can recover it by undoing the transaction in your wallet since the transaction never got send to the network (assuming u modified bitcoin to not send the transaction)).

greetings

[Nyhm]

Account to Account Transfers in the bitcoind (or bitcoin-qt?) application:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Accounts_explained#Account_-.3E_Account_Transfers

Use the move method to transfer balances from one account to another. Moves from the default account to any other account always succeed; moves from any other account will fail if the account has insufficient funds. Moves are not broadcast to the network, and never incur transaction fees; they just adjust account balances in the wallet.

This is the functionality to which I refer. The documentation is not clear whether the bitcoin-qt GUI application uses true Bitcoin transactions or will fall back on this move behavior when requesting to send bitcoin value to another address within your wallet.

In my opinion, the Account concept (read the full wiki page above) is a very useful feature, but has no place in the defacto/reference software from bitcoin.org. They should provide a reference implementation that does not have such features and release the more feature-full edition separately. Anyway, that's getting rather off topic.

Can anyone clarify the behavior of bitcoin-qt when sending values intra-wallet?

[K1773R]

Account to Account Transfers in the bitcoind (or bitcoin-qt?) application:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Accounts_explained#Account_-.3E_Account_Transfers

Use the move method to transfer balances from one account to another. Moves from the default account to any other account always succeed; moves from any other account will fail if the account has insufficient funds. Moves are not broadcast to the network, and never incur transaction fees; they just adjust account balances in the wallet.

This is the functionality to which I refer. The documentation is not clear whether the bitcoin-qt GUI application uses true Bitcoin transactions or will fall back on this move behavior when requesting to send bitcoin value to another address within your wallet.

In my opinion, the Account concept (read the full wiki page above) is a very useful feature, but has no place in the defacto/reference software from bitcoin.org. They should provide a reference implementation that does not have such features and release the more feature-full edition separately. Anyway, that's getting rather off topic.

Can anyone clarify the behavior of bitcoin-qt when sending values intra-wallet?

both.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Account to Account Transfers in the bitcoind (or bitcoin-qt?) application:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Accounts_explained#Account_-.3E_Account_Transfers

Use the move method to transfer balances from one account to another. Moves from the default account to any other account always succeed; moves from any other account will fail if the account has insufficient funds. Moves are not broadcast to the network, and never incur transaction fees; they just adjust account balances in the wallet.

This is the functionality to which I refer. The documentation is not clear whether the bitcoin-qt GUI application uses true Bitcoin transactions or will fall back on this move behavior when requesting to send bitcoin value to another address within your wallet.

In my opinion, the Account concept (read the full wiki page above) is a very useful feature, but has no place in the defacto/reference software from bitcoin.org. They should provide a reference implementation that does not have such features and release the more feature-full edition separately. Anyway, that's getting rather off topic.

Can anyone clarify the behavior of bitcoin-qt when sending values intra-wallet?

Accounts aren't addresses.   Accounts are groups of addresses.  It was designed to be an accounting system for wallets but honestly it is next to worthless (for a variety of reasons).

If you want to send 1 BTC from address A to address B the only way possible to create a tx and submit it to the network.  It doesn't matter if address A & B are in the same wallet or on other sides of the globe.  There are no exceptions.  

If you think about it obviously this has to always be the case.  If you could move funds between addresses without making a tx how would the network verify their balances?

[Nyhm]

Account to Account Transfers in the bitcoind (or bitcoin-qt?) application:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Accounts_explained#Account_-.3E_Account_Transfers

Use the move method to transfer balances from one account to another. Moves from the default account to any other account always succeed; moves from any other account will fail if the account has insufficient funds. Moves are not broadcast to the network, and never incur transaction fees; they just adjust account balances in the wallet.

This is the functionality to which I refer. The documentation is not clear whether the bitcoin-qt GUI application uses true Bitcoin transactions or will fall back on this move behavior when requesting to send bitcoin value to another address within your wallet.

In my opinion, the Account concept (read the full wiki page above) is a very useful feature, but has no place in the defacto/reference software from bitcoin.org. They should provide a reference implementation that does not have such features and release the more feature-full edition separately. Anyway, that's getting rather off topic.

Can anyone clarify the behavior of bitcoin-qt when sending values intra-wallet?

Accounts aren't addresses.   Accounts are groups of addresses.  It was designed to be an accounting system for wallets but honestly it is next to worthless (for a variety of reasons).

If you want to send 1 BTC from address A to address B the only way possible to create a tx and submit it to the network.  It doesn't matter if address A & B are in the same wallet or on other sides of the globe.  There are no exceptions.  

If you think about it obviously this has to always be the case.  If you could move funds between addresses without making a tx how would the network verify their balances?

I understand exactly what you mean. Here's how I interpreted the Account feature: The wallet balance doesn't represent which private keys own which transactions. You can move value within your wallet for your own bookkeeping. When you send funds, you cannot choose from which Input transactions (or associated private keys) are chosen, and the wallet takes the balance from the "default" account. Accounts can even go negative, which also supports this behavior. Thus, an "account balance" is just high-level bookkeeping, and the actual funds are a mix of transactions. So, the client silently just changes intra-wallet account values without sending transactions (because the wallet doesn't care to actually perform those transactions).

I have enough cryptographic experience to understand what is going on, and the bitcoin.org documentation still tripped me up. Thanks for your clarifications. Sorry to have taken this off-topic. I'll do some further research/testing.

[GuinnessBIT]

Theoretically,  does it matter if I start and stop vanitygen when trying to find a regular expression vanity match?

Am I better to "pause" it after it's been running for a few days (which I really can't do)

The reason I ask is because I need to reboot but I've been trying to find a match for a couple of days and if I start and stop, do I basically have to start brute force at the beginning, or is it like mining where stopping and starting theoretically doesnt matter.

thanks for any advice,

-gBIT

[GuinnessBIT]

ok, never mind previous post. I think I found the answer (didnt show up in search) but I see that it doesnt matter if you stop and start it.

[2weiX]

ok, never mind previous post. I think I found the answer (didnt show up in search) but I see that it doesnt matter if you stop and start it.

so this means that I can seach for an expression, then quit vgen, start it again later and it will not repeat the work it has already done?

[K1773R]

ok, never mind previous post. I think I found the answer (didnt show up in search) but I see that it doesnt matter if you stop and start it.

so this means that I can seach for an expression, then quit vgen, start it again later and it will not repeat the work it has already done?

no, the work done isnt based on previous work since you generate keys from a random seed.

[ingrownpocket]

Subscribing... Cuz ill need this soon

same

[MoTLD]

First off, thanks samr7 for an awesome and fun tool!

That being said, I've got a feature request. Is there any way vanitygen could handle two text file lists simultaneously, one case-sensitive and the other -insensitive?

I find myself with some short strings I'd like to find with exact casing and some long-shot long strings for which I don't care about case. To do this, I was running two instances of vanitygen, but then it occurred to me that one instance could skip over a lucky find that the other instance was looking for.

So, again, thanks for a great utility...but please make it better.

-Mo

PS - In the meantime, I'm using some tools and scripts to create a huge wordlist of all case combinations of my target strings, essentially replicating vanitygen's case-insensitive functionality. I'll let y'all know how it turns out.

[MoTLD]

The huge wordlist is working just fine. For those who aren't adept at shell scripts or are (like me) stuck using somebody else's windoze machine, you can make it work using Morten's Dictionary Maker and specifying an output file.

Unfortunately, when I feed that program a word beginning with 1 it creates a list of words with and without the 1, and it has no option to exclude words with specific characters. So it creates a lot of unnecessary words, but they can be removed with the following command:

Code:

type wordlist.txt|find "1"|find /v "l"|find /v "I"| find /v "O">parsedwordlist.txt

Replace "wordlist.txt" with whatever file you specified for DictMaker to output, and "parsedwordlist.txt" with whatever you want to name your usable list. Also, because it might not be clear, the first find command finds and keeps lines with the number one, and the rest find and remove lines with lowercase L, uppercase i, and uppercase o. I don't worry about zero because I'm not including it in any of my words.

My current wordlist has over 3.5 million strings, and aside from taking a while to start, vanitygen seems to be handling it just fine.

On another note, how come vanitygen seems to top out at 27 characters for an address? When I tried to specify a 28-character address, it said it was too long. But aren't addresses usually around 33 characters? Is this a purposeful limitation in vanitygen to reduce memory usage or some other overhead? Or is it a limitation in addresses that I just don't understand? Or, maybe, is it a bug that can be fixed, please?

And yes, before everybody jumps on me, I know just how astronomical are the odds against finding a 27 or 28 character string, even case insensitively, but if I'm going to be generating and checking billions of addresses anyway I might as well check them for every string I think is interesting, even the really unlikely long ones.

Maybe I'll get lucky.

-Mo

[The00Dustin]

On another note, how come vanitygen seems to top out at 27 characters for an address? When I tried to specify a 28-character address, it said it was too long. But aren't addresses usually around 33 characters? Is this a purposeful limitation in vanitygen to reduce memory usage or some other overhead? Or is it a limitation in addresses that I just don't understand? Or, maybe, is it a bug that can be fixed, please?

I noticed this because I was messing around to see the difficulty numbers and length of time to 50% or whatever it was.  I could be wrong, but I assumed the length limitation was due to the last part of the address being a checksum (making exactly what you want not necessarily possible).

[deepceleron]

You can truncate your 28 character phrase to 12 characters, and it still won't be found for years. The processing power and time to find a Bitcoin address that long is essentially equivalent to breaking Bitcoin cryptography - something like the age of the universe if the entire earth was GPU cores.

OpenCL vanitygen on even a meager GPU will be 50 times faster, but the word list will overflow around 20000 to 50000 words depending on the lengths. You can do a case-insensitive search for your words, and for the ones where you wanted a single case, just ignore the undesireable results; for a six-letter phrase, you will get about 64 "bad" results for every result with the correct case.

[Nyhm]

I noticed that someone wanted case-sensitive vanity address searching. My vanity address applet now (v0.2) has such an option. It's really slow, as I'm just experimenting. Here's the bitcointalk topic.

(Notice that I specifically reference Vanitygen as a much more capable generator, so I'm not trying to steal any thunder from this mighty thread. Please leave any feedback regarding my applet on the other thread.)