Generating Vanity Addresses

[blackhathasher]

I have been generating a vanity address and it has been running for almost a month now and reporting 75% in 3 more days (est.)

Is this normal? How long does it usually take? Have I done something wrong?

[1714872754]

1714872754

[1714872754]

1714872754

[1714872754]

1714872754

[1714872754]

1714872754

[lemfuture]

notin wrong. it usually long a wait

[byt411]

Nothing is wrong, what prefix are you trying to generate?
With a normal PC it's really hard to generate them.

[bitbudget]

Depends on your hardware and the number of symbols you chose.

[KaChingCoinDev]

Normal for 6 Characters. You have more patience than me

[bitbudget]

Try picking 2-3 symbol addresses and see how it works before trying longer ones.

[blackhathasher]

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback... I just wanted to make sure I wasn't spinning my wheels and would have to start over again...

I loaded the vanitygen on one of my unused servers in my data center and turned it loose finding the pattern but when it was taking so long I was afraid I may have done something dumb and would have to start over again.

Whew!

[blackhathasher]

i have a pretty specific address with 9 characters.

i just checked and see that i am right at 17 days and will be at 75% in 2.3 days...

i suspect the next 25% may take another 10-20 days.

[DannyHamilton]

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback... I just wanted to make sure I wasn't spinning my wheels and would have to start over again...

There is no "starting over".  The program doesn't "make progress".

It continuously generates random addresses and then checks to see if they match you pattern.  Depending on how long and specific you pattern is, it could take seconds, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, or millienia before it happens to stumble across the pattern you are looking for.

If you stop and restart it, it doesn't "lose its place" or have to "start over".  When you restart it, it simply goes back to generating random addresses and checking each one to see if it matches the pattern.  Sort of like flipping a coin and trying to get 25 heads in a row.  If you stop flipping the coin for a while and then start up again the coin doesn't "remember" where you left off or "lose its place".  It doesn't have to "start over".

I loaded the vanitygen on one of my unused servers in my data center and turned it loose finding the pattern but when it was taking so long I was afraid I may have done something dumb and would have to start over again.

Whew!

Depending on how long and complex of a pattern you are trying to match, you very well may have "done something dumb". I'm a bit surprised that is calculated an estimate of 3 days, but hasn't found anything yet after a month.  Perhaps the time estimation has an error? Or maybe you're just really unlucky.

[blackhathasher]

ahh that makes sense...

current probability is at 68.9% with 75% estimated in a little over 2 days.

[DannyHamilton]

i have a pretty specific address with 9 characters.

Wow!

If you are particular about upper vs. lower case, (and if I've got my math right) that should be an average of about 1 match out of every 7,500,000,000,000,000 addresses generated.

Not sure how many addresses your server can calculate per second, but if it can do 250,000,000 addresses per second, that should find on average about one match per year.

[lnternet]

vanity is best outsourced, so when searching you are not just searching for your one address but for all requested ones at once

[blackhathasher]

looks like i am averaging about 1000K keys/s on a quad core opteron 2.51GHz proc

and no i have no particulars on upper and lower case. just the nine digits.

[lnternet]

digits or characters?

[blackhathasher]

vanity is best outsourced, so when searching you are not just searching for your one address but for all requested ones at once

what do you mean??

[blackhathasher]

digits or characters?

1xxxxxxxx  (alpha characters)

[DannyHamilton]

digits or characters?

1xxxxxxxx  (alpha characters)

That will reduce the search space significantly. (although the 1000k per second is quite a bit slower than the 250,000k that I had based my calculations on).

Good luck.  9 characters is a lot to match.  I don't think I've seen anyone yet with a 9 character vanity address.

[blackhathasher]

digits or characters?

1xxxxxxxx  (alpha characters)

That will reduce the search space significantly. (although the 1000k per second is quite a bit slower than the 250,000k that I had based my calculations on).

Good luck.  9 characters is a lot to match.  I don't think I've seen anyone yet with a 9 character vanity address.

it sounds like i can just run vanitygen and several machines to increase my odds and there isn't necessarily a duplication of work... just luck.
 

[lnternet]

Well assuming you want any with 8 a or A like

1aaaaaaaa
1AaaAaaaA
1AAAAAAAA

You have a 2^8/58^8 chance to hit per round. Thats about 10^-12. If you run 10^6 per second, you need about 10^6 seconds on average to find it. That's about 12 days. Since we rounded a bit, somewhere from a day to few weeks should be normal.

[DannyHamilton]

it sounds like i can just run vanitygen and several machines to increase my odds and there isn't necessarily a duplication of work... just luck.

Correct.