Vanity Pool - vanity address generator pool

[Ente]

How is this?  The pool gives a mining ratio that is supposed to represent how many more times profitable it is to mine vanity addresses than bitcoins, and it's currently 2.78.  I can see how the variability of this would be higher than a PPS or geometric method pool, but over long periods it should still pay better, right?

That ratio is a bit idealised and assumes you are mining all the addresses at the same time (additive rather than multiplicative address generation). From what I understand, samr7's miner just uses a few of the most profitable addresses and that's it.

From how I understand it, you can easily mine several addresses at once, think merged mining, when the "task" was created from the same private key.
If I ask for 10 vanity addresses, and create those 10 tasks so that they all are made from the same seed, someone can work at all 10 at once.
If 10 people each want one address they surely won't create the tasks from the same seed/key. So a vanity miner will have to mine an hour for the first guy, then an hour for the next, and can only find an address/solution for the current task.

That 2.78 assumes that you mine at *all* tasks available at once, which is unrealistic at least, and suggestive/dishonest at worst.

So, currently, I think, there are several miner out there which check periodically on the available work. Once a task or combination of tasks appear which is more profitable than regular mining, they point their miners there. Which means a lot of the current tasks may stay there waiting for a long time..

Lets see if a marketrate with more realistic prices establishes!

Ente

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[Otoh]

I'm assuming that when ASICs are prevalent & difficulty goes through the roof that will make vanity mining a much more attractive alternative & so clear up a lot of the old requests, btw a couple of mine were solved a while back but recently when I came to import the private keys in to my blockchain.info wallet I had 'error importing private key - unknown key format' this was for addresses:

11976WATj2ujAvg7booAr4STNH5DUBFRZ - 2012/11/13

1Knicks1bujdxrXTaZbf8YLzU8rh8Pbq5G - 2012/10/29

The vanity sum correctly generated the addresses but seems to give an incorrect sum of private keys, unless it's a wallet error but I think that I checked them somewhere else & got the same error message. I've checked that my copy & paste of it was exact & no spaces before or after, it's not already in the wallet either.

[ThePiachu]

Hmm, maybe the blockchain.info uses WIF, rather than just plain copying and pasting of private keys?

[Otoh]

Hmm, maybe the blockchain.info uses WIF, rather than just plain copying and pasting of private keys?

All the other ones have imported fine np, also I checked the private keys somewhere where you can generate the matching address & it also said that they were invalid keys.

Edit: It was at https://www.bitaddress.org (Wallet details, enter private key in any format) & it says: ' The text you entered is not a valid Private Key! '

[ThePiachu]

Well, you can always try http://gobittest.appspot.com/

[Otoh]

http://gobittest.appspot.com/VanitySum gave me the sum of private keys that is being reported as invalid

& http://gobittest.appspot.com/PrivateKey gives:    Invalid Base58 encoding

but http://gobittest.appspot.com/Address gives the correct address as derived from the private key: 1Knicks1bujdxrXTaZbf8YLzU8rh8Pbq5G

[ThePiachu]

As for /PrivateKey , I see a lot of errors originating around "generateFromWIF" function. Are you sure you weren't putting the private key in as WIF? The private key -> WIF conversion is in the middle of the page, under bold "Private key to wallet import format".

[Otoh]

Nope, I've never used WIF, I just made the WIF now & that doesn't work either, blockchain.info wallets accept the straight private keys as summed but for for these 2 vanities the private keys given seem to be invalid.

[Otoh]

Also when the private keys are tested at https://www.bitaddress.org (Wallet details, enter private key in any format) & it says: ' The text you entered is not a valid Private Key! '

[ThePiachu]

Hmm, strange. I guess there is no option but for me to refund you. As you probably used the same private/public key to request for that address as the others, then you shouldn't reveal it to protect your other purchases.

Then again, a private key is just a number between 1 and
FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFE BAAEDCE6 AF48A03B BFD25E8C D0364141

Is your key bigger than the latter number? If so, try doing modulo that number and see if the result would work.

[Otoh]

I don't know how to tell if they within that range, one starts with D217... & the other with C61F... I used the same pri/pub key for all my requests, also I don't know how to modulo the number but can try if you point me to where, thanks for looking in to this, luckily I'd only sent a token amount to each address in order to get the FirstBits address - which incidentally seems to be down the last few days.

Edit: I guess that they are within the correct range as they start with a letter before F in the alphabet. There're both 62 chars long.

[ThePiachu]

Well, to check whether your private key is bigger than the number, simply substract that number from it.

For example, if your private key was
E343AF66D9394E3FFE3ED63C263A17F737917CAA35636B9FCA919A113368AB7F

You would calculate
0xE343AF66D9394E3FFE3ED63C263A17F737917CAA35636B9FCA919A113368AB7F-0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364141

or just use Wolfram:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0xE343AF66D9394E3FFE3ED63C263A17F737917CAA35636B9FCA919A113368AB7F-0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364141

If the number is negative, means that your private key is in the range.

Check both your original private key and the derived one to see if they are okay.

[Otoh]

I checked both the van generated ones & they're negative so within the range & I know that my original one is also as I've used it on dozens of successful van gens & also just imported it to my wallet now with np.

[fizzisist]

How is this?  The pool gives a mining ratio that is supposed to represent how many more times profitable it is to mine vanity addresses than bitcoins, and it's currently 2.78.  I can see how the variability of this would be higher than a PPS or geometric method pool, but over long periods it should still pay better, right?

That ratio is a bit idealised and assumes you are mining all the addresses at the same time (additive rather than multiplicative address generation). From what I understand, samr7's miner just uses a few of the most profitable addresses and that's it.

From how I understand it, you can easily mine several addresses at once, think merged mining, when the "task" was created from the same private key.
If I ask for 10 vanity addresses, and create those 10 tasks so that they all are made from the same seed, someone can work at all 10 at once.
If 10 people each want one address they surely won't create the tasks from the same seed/key. So a vanity miner will have to mine an hour for the first guy, then an hour for the next, and can only find an address/solution for the current task.

That 2.78 assumes that you mine at *all* tasks available at once, which is unrealistic at least, and suggestive/dishonest at worst.

So, currently, I think, there are several miner out there which check periodically on the available work. Once a task or combination of tasks appear which is more profitable than regular mining, they point their miners there. Which means a lot of the current tasks may stay there waiting for a long time..

Lets see if a marketrate with more realistic prices establishes!

Ente

Prices are just what people are willing to pay for the vanity address, so is as realistic as it gets, by definition. The only problem is that bitcoin mining is more valuable right now. That is bound to change when more ASICs hit.

As for the "ratio" calculation, it's certainly misleading. I prefer my calculations on http://fizzisist.com/mining-value/. These should correspond to exactly what you see in vanitygen.

[ThePiachu]

I checked both the van generated ones & they're negative so within the range & I know that my original one is also as I've used it on dozens of successful van gens & also just imported it to my wallet now with np.

Well, then I am currently puzzled as to why it doesn't work. It should be importable, as it is just a number really.

[Otoh]

Yep, mystery to me too, I thought it may have been something I did wrong when I tried a week or two ago but retrying now it still fails & other van gens of mine just solved work fine doing exactly the same normal calc & import process, anyway maybe best to warn ppl not to send much to newly generated van addies until they are sure that the private keys are wallet importable.

[abbeytim]

got a question in the pool does only the one that solves it get paid the reward
or is it a pool where a bunch of people solve it together like with bitcoin



reason I also was wondering I have a rig with my 5970s and I had to create a . bat for each gpu on it I was wondering can you mine with all gpus with 1 .bat

[ThePiachu]

got a question in the pool does only the one that solves it get paid the reward
or is it a pool where a bunch of people solve it together like with bitcoin



reason I also was wondering I have a rig with my 5970s and I had to create a . bat for each gpu on it I was wondering can you mine with all gpus with 1 .bat

The pool does not count shares, only the person that produces the solution receives the reward.

[abbeytim]

good thankyou now my other question im mining with the 5970 and is there a way I can specify to use both gpus to solve because

I have 2 .bats running 1 for each gpu on the 5970  each one is like 24mkeys/s

id like to have both gpus mining together and get like 48 mkeys/s

[ThePiachu]

good thankyou now my other question im mining with the 5970 and is there a way I can specify to use both gpus to solve because

I have 2 .bats running 1 for each gpu on the 5970  each one is like 24mkeys/s

id like to have both gpus mining together and get like 48 mkeys/s

You should ask samr7 about it, as he is the person behind vanity miner. I am just running the pool, so I don't know that program.