Bitcoin Vanity Address(es)

[Fivestar4everMVP]

This post is best suited in Bitcoin Discussion Board, But I decided to make it here so that it will reach more Newbies and they can learn from it.

I found this Bitcoin Address "1DarkStrRagcDjWtsPGxkav4WG3poLXzDS" which belongs to DarkStar_.

I also found this Bitcoin Address "1NinjabXd5znM5zgTcmxDVzH4w3nbaY16L" which belongs to TryNinja.

Initially, I never knew it was possible to incorporate a username or part of it into an Address, the addresses above looked very cool, unique and outstanding to me, so I wanted one of such but I didn't know how to go about it, I didn't even know what such an address was called, I went into research, and through google search, I found an article on one of this news outlet sites which brought be back to this topic on the forum https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25804.0.
From this, I discovered such Bitcoin address(es) are called Vanity Address, and if you also took notice of the date the above post was made which dates back to 2011, it is evident that such addresses is almost as old as Bitcoin itself.

I am interested in having my own Bitcoin Vanity address, but the procedures of getting one (according to the thread I mentioned above) seems a bit complicated to understand, and since the thread dated from way back 2011 and we are currently in 2022, I want to assume that by now, there might be new and updated ways to get such an address that is less complicated.

EDIT:- I Feel I Should Add This.
What Is A Vanity Address?
A bitcoin vanity address is the crypto equivalent of a personalized license plate, with a portion of its 26-35 alphanumeric characters closely mirroring the name of the wallet’s owner. For fundraising, collecting tips or soliciting donations, having a bitcoin address that’s synonymous with its owner can be advantageous, despite the privacy trade-off this entails.
Definition source

Do you have any idea?, lets discuss and learn together.

[Upgrade00]

Do you have any idea?, lets discuss and learn together.

I have personally not looked into vanity addresses, but LoyceV has a giveaway thread which has been running for a number of years now; Pretty Addy Giveaway.
You follow the instructions and then make a request with the customized characters you would like.

[jackg]

You can also search for vanitygen (I'd link it here but I can only find the source code).

Edit: found the announcement thread with the binaries/runnable programs: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=25804.0

Windows x86+x64 binaries here.  PGP signature here

Get the source from GitHub.  Includes Makefiles for Linux and Mac OS X.

Don't trust online website services though as a lot of them are scam (unless they only generate half a key and make you generate the other half - as the legit ones do).

[Saint-loup]

Yes it's pretty old fashioned and outdated, that's why it's surprising you haven't heard about it before while you are an old Hero member from 2016, it is not recommended to use this kind of address because it viciously encourages to use the same address again and again for anything and to even send back your change to it. I think it's better to only reserves it for signing messages to prove your identity, but even for this use case there are disadvantages since people knowing you are using a vanity address are less likely to carefully check the address if an attacker use a vanity address to impersonate you.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

Yes it's pretty old fashioned and outdated, that's why it's surprising you haven't heard about it before while you are an old Hero member from 2016,

Sincerely, I've never heard of such addresses, not until some weeks back, and yes, I joined the forum in 2016 but was inactive till towards the ending of 2020, I became really active in 2021 which is last year.

it is not recommended to use this kind of address because it viciously encourages to use the same address again and again for anything and to even send back your change to it.

If this was the only disadvantage of using this type of address, i honestly wouldnt mind having one... But

but even for this use case there are disadvantages since people knowing you are using a vanity address are less likely to carefully check the address if an attacker use a vanity address to impersonate you.

This one caught my attention, this is something I didn't even think about, I didn't imagine it was possible for an attacker to impersonate my Vanity address, am guessing the way this is possible is by the attacker using my vanity address initials to set up his own vanity address, the end result being that the beginning of the vanity address of the attacker will be same as mine, but the alphanumerics that follow wont be the same, but it wont occur to users sending funds to the address to check the rest of the Alphanumerics since the beginning of the address already has my initials which bears my identity.

Is there not a way to make it completely impossible to create another vanity address that bears the same initials with one that's already created before?, like it is when you get an error like "this username has been taken" when trying to create a username that matches with another username in a forum .

[Stalker22]

This one caught my attention, this is something I didn't even think about, I didn't imagine it was possible for an attacker to impersonate my Vanity address, am guessing the way this is possible is by the attacker using my vanity address initials to set up his own vanity address, the end result being that the beginning of the vanity address of the attacker will be same as mine, but the alphanumerics that follow wont be the same, but it wont occur to users sending funds to the address to check the rest of the Alphanumerics since the beginning of the address already has my initials which bears my identity.

That is basically true. But the same goes for any other address. Anyone can create an address that is identical to someone else's in the first few characters.
Even so, I still think that such addresses are cool, for example for accepting donations or using in online profiles.

Is there not a way to make it completely impossible to create another vanity address that bears the same initials with one that's already created before?, like it is when you get an error like "this username has been taken" when trying to create a username that matches with another username in a forum .

No. That is definitely not possible.

[Pokapoka124]

The first time I saw this kind of Bitcoin address was in bestchange signature campaign bitcoin transaction mempool, 1BESTCHANGEuX2oUwodgvJqB52kTsrfXS9 was easy to identify as the official address used to distribute the signature earnings to all the participants. I haven't attempted to create mine cause I didn't have a need to do so.  It looks cool though

[jackg]

Is there not a way to make it completely impossible to create another vanity address that bears the same initials with one that's already created before?, like it is when you get an error like "this username has been taken" when trying to create a username that matches with another username in a forum .

This might be a case of it depends.

If used for payments there are ways to make things memorable - people like finding patterns from what is said about trading so why not make them?

If you can find a few stand out symbols then it becomes a lot harder for people to replace your address with another. (you might have to make a few addresses for this to work well though - and use the one it works best for).

3 letter words are often fairly easy to find in addresses and would make them harder to believably replicate for users paying attention to what they're doing.

[pooya87]

I am interested in having my own Bitcoin Vanity address, but the procedures of getting one (according to the thread I mentioned above) seems a bit complicated to understand, and since the thread dated from way back 2011 and we are currently in 2022, I want to assume that by now, there might be new and updated ways to get such an address that is less complicated.

Nothing has changed about that project, last commit is from 2012. The procedure doesn't have to be that hard though, it is just that it doesn't have a GUI so you have to type in the commands. The simplest way is to just add your starting letters like running:

Code:

./vanitygen 1MPV

And the code will search and give you your key + address starting with 1MVP in the end.

[dkbit98]

I am interested in having my own Bitcoin Vanity address, but the procedures of getting one (according to the thread I mentioned above) seems a bit complicated to understand, and since the thread dated from way back 2011 and we are currently in 2022, I want to assume that by now, there might be new and updated ways to get such an address that is less complicated.

It's not complicated at all to generate your own Vanity address, but if you don't know how to do it with clear instructions, you can also use services that can generate them for you.
Last year I decided to follow instructions posted by member Jean_Luc, downloaded Vanitysearch and generated two vanity addresses dedicated to Lauda.
P2SH: 3LAUDAv3id4CDLC87x6uaR3NjWNRs3NHuP
bech32: bc1qlaudahydf4axnjalaf9paz94l2lhh3h4qew0wc

I did all this in few minutes, and I am not tech expert or something like that, but it's important to say that it's better to generate your addresses with internet turned off.
Here is tutorial for vanity addresses generation posted by Jean_Luc:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5144752.0

I found few more websites that can generate vanity addresses for you, nicewalletaddress.com and vanity-address.bitcoin-uni.de, but their code is not open source and I would much rather do it myself with Vanitysearch.

LoyceV was also offering his service called Pretty Addy Giveaway for legacy addresses, but I am not sure if it's still available and you would have to trust him with your private key.

[tranthidung]

• Don't try cool things if you don't know what you're doing and not aware of risk. Cool things might not bring any or much benefit but might cause lot of risk.
• [Guide] How to create your customized Bitcoin-Address (vanitygen) – step by step
• [GUIDE] How To Create Vanity Address (Segwit)
• 1SPLiTKEY.com The easy, secure and mostly free vanity wallet service. I don't use this service but it seems they have good feedback.
• I don't have interest in cool things if they contain risk and I am not expert in tech and security to protect myself when I am trying cool things.

[Mpamaegbu]

3 letter words are often fairly easy to find in addresses and would make them harder to believably replicate for users paying attention to what they're doing.

That brings me to what I observed with my wallet app early last year or so. It was a Blockchain wallet app I was using then and I needed to receive Bitcoin from a seller. In order to differentiate that transaction I needed to send a fresh address from the same wallet app I had been using. Surprisingly I discovered that the new address was a legacy address turned vanity with the first three letters of my name to it. I didn't do anything to generate that vanity address and it kind of astonished but excited me. However, till date I haven't made use of that address as I couldn't get around how that happened. Is there anything I should be worried of with that?

[Stalker22]

3 letter words are often fairly easy to find in addresses and would make them harder to believably replicate for users paying attention to what they're doing.

That brings me to what I observed with my wallet app early last year or so. It was a Blockchain wallet app I was using then and I needed to receive Bitcoin from a seller. In order to differentiate that transaction I needed to send a fresh address from the same wallet app I had been using. Surprisingly I discovered that the new address was a legacy address turned vanity with the first three letters of my name to it. I didn't do anything to generate that vanity address and it kind of astonished but excited me. However, till date I haven't made use of that address as I couldn't get around how that happened. Is there anything I should be worried of with that?

There is no such thing as a vanity address generator on Blockchain wallet app that I know of. Most likely, it was just a coincidence. The chances are slim, but still possible.

[Mpamaegbu]

~snipped~

Most likely, it was just a coincidence. The chances are slim, but still possible.

The only thing that could've made that address generation possible would be perhaps an email address I used because I had to tie 2FA to that wallet. That's the only plausible explanation I would've for that. To be honest, I'm sure I wouldn't have even noticed the peculiarity of that address if I hadn't read and known about vanity address to be somewhat customized like number plates. It would've passed like any regular address before me if not that I often take note of the first four letters and last four of my wallet addresses in order to check for any malware changing wallet address from clipboard. Well, I guess (I'm thinking, anyway) Blockchain did that to say a little thank you to a loyal customer like me.

[jackg]

3 letter words are often fairly easy to find in addresses and would make them harder to believably replicate for users paying attention to what they're doing.

That brings me to what I observed with my wallet app early last year or so. It was a Blockchain wallet app I was using then and I needed to receive Bitcoin from a seller. In order to differentiate that transaction I needed to send a fresh address from the same wallet app I had been using. Surprisingly I discovered that the new address was a legacy address turned vanity with the first three letters of my name to it. I didn't do anything to generate that vanity address and it kind of astonished but excited me. However, till date I haven't made use of that address as I couldn't get around how that happened. Is there anything I should be worried of with that?

The chances of that happening are about 97556:1 - anything below about 2000:1 would be something I'd consider could happen so if you have generated 50+ addresses then it'd be likely to happen.

It's not uncommon anyway, I've had this before with an address I generated on a wallet.

[aysg76]

In the past it was quite interesting practice by many to generate Vanity address according to their preference and it's not hard at all and you can generate one but you should be careful depending on the difficulty to crack it.

You can generate easily one from the services available or through split key method which will give private keys access to only you not anyone else.

There was a thread created by me in past depicting how vanity scams were on rise as people use influential people names in these vanity address and then people deposit money to them in hope of earning more.

Also have a look at this image below from the thread in the past to depict how hard is it to crack these vanity address


Average time taken to crack address

So it's not hard and there are plenty of services available that will do the job but do it yourself and through various ways you have been suggested above and you can generate lot of them preety fast.

[khaled0111]

Also have a look at this image below from the thread in the past to depict how hard is it to crack these vanity address
...

Just a small correction (although am certain you already know this) just to avoid any confusion: the "average time" in the last column isn't the time needed to crack the address but the time (theoretically) needed to find an address starting with the same characters and it's almost impossible to generate exactly the same address.
Never use online or closed-source tools to generate vanity addresses. Better use a well know tool such as vanitygen on an airgapped computer.

[NeuroticFish]

I've used vanity addresses in the past, but not anymore. They look cool for a while, but then... they're just addresses.
As said, there can be risks, especially if you don't know what you're doing or using a flawed tool. Then there are obvious privacy concerns. Then they kinda make you reuse address, which is not great either...

So at the moment I understood HD wallets, I gave up vanity addresses.

@Fivestar4everMVP: you can look for topics about vanitygen, get the newest binaries from the oldest thread, play with it locally, whether you'll ever use such an address or not. You will see that it's not quick&easy to generate one, especially if it's long. if you want to use such an address, make sure it's a good vanitygen and make sure you generate it in a safe environment.

[Diplester6666]

While having an address that is unique to your characteristics may sound cool, it also makes you re-use this address for multiple transactions over a really long period of time. As everyone would agree, this is a privacy issue and one needs to take it into consideration before making a decision. As best practice one should never use an address twice.

[pooya87]

While having an address that is unique to your characteristics may sound cool, it also makes you re-use this address for multiple transactions over a really long period of time. As everyone would agree, this is a privacy issue and one needs to take it into consideration before making a decision. As best practice one should never use an address twice.

It is not always a privacy issue because it depends on the usage. For example someone who is receiving payments linked to their identity or virtual identity regularly is not concerned about address reuse. Like a donation address or signature campaign payments. Imagine if a campaign participant changed their address for each payment, it wouldn't provide any privacy since all those payments are linked to their virtual identity already.