Vanity Pool - vanity address generator pool

[FLHippy]

I've implemented a sort of "mining pool" for creating vanity addresses with zero needed trust

This is a cool idea.

I have a question and 2 suggestions.

suggestions:
 1. provide instructions for generating EDCSA key pairs.
 2. realistic bounties based on difficulty. Obviously .11 BTC bounty for a 9 letter case sensitive vanity address is too small, While I realize this is a test, This address is probably worth something like $500USD in energy usage and wear and tear on hardware. On my macbook pro it's only going to take 1.7 years to reach 50% probability for 1DanieLRH.

Question: Have you received enough interest in your project to warrant a move from a bounty system to a  true pool system where everyone in the pool is working to generate a vanity address and then shares in the profit? The bounty method seems incredibly wasteful.

I like your project enough that I've sent you a very small donation. I hope this develops into something the community can use as a viable income resource in the future.

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[ThePiachu]

1. provide instructions for generating EDCSA key pairs.

Sure, I`ll try doing that with the next update.

2. realistic bounties based on difficulty.

Yeah, I`ll probably have to do something about it. So far "pay what you want" has turned out to be "pay minimum amount".

Question: Have you received enough interest in your project to warrant a move from a bounty system to a  true pool system where everyone in the pool is working to generate a vanity address and then shares in the profit? The bounty method seems incredibly wasteful.

Not yet. So far the interest has been slim. But yeah, once the site gets popular I`ll probably have to move into the traditional pool system. For now, I`m just keeping it simple.

I like your project enough that I've sent you a very small donation. I hope this develops into something the community can use as a viable income resource in the future.

Thank you for your donation. I also hope more people become interested in the project. Perhaps some hybrid between a vanity address and a Bitcoin debit card would do the trick...

[phantastisch]

I've implemented a sort of "mining pool" for creating vanity addresses with zero needed trust

This is a cool idea.

I have a question and 2 suggestions.

suggestions:
 1. provide instructions for generating EDCSA key pairs.
 2. realistic bounties based on difficulty. Obviously .11 BTC bounty for a 9 letter case sensitive vanity address is too small, While I realize this is a test, This address is probably worth something like $500USD in energy usage and wear and tear on hardware. On my macbook pro it's only going to take 1.7 years to reach 50% probability for 1DanieLRH.

Question: Have you received enough interest in your project to warrant a move from a bounty system to a  true pool system where everyone in the pool is working to generate a vanity address and then shares in the profit? The bounty method seems incredibly wasteful.

I like your project enough that I've sent you a very small donation. I hope this develops into something the community can use as a viable income resource in the future.

With my Radeon 5830 1DanieLRH would take 23 days, thats not even close to 23 Euro even here in Germany , where electricity is expensive. But i would approve difficulty adjusted rewards.

[ThePiachu]

Well, that`s another problem - there isn`t enough data on key mining efficiency vs normal mining for almost any GPU. This could make such judgement calls a bit imprecise.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

To be honest, I already had thought of a Vanity pool concept last year around this time, trouble was that I had no idea how it would work. Back then I was not familiar with public-key cryptography much less that you can add them or multiply them.

1. provide instructions for generating EDCSA key pairs.

Sure, I`ll try doing that with the next update.

2. realistic bounties based on difficulty.

Yeah, I`ll probably have to do something about it. So far "pay what you want" has turned out to be "pay minimum amount".

Question: Have you received enough interest in your project to warrant a move from a bounty system to a  true pool system where everyone in the pool is working to generate a vanity address and then shares in the profit? The bounty method seems incredibly wasteful.

Not yet. So far the interest has been slim. But yeah, once the site gets popular I`ll probably have to move into the traditional pool system. For now, I`m just keeping it simple.

I like your project enough that I've sent you a very small donation. I hope this develops into something the community can use as a viable income resource in the future.

Thank you for your donation. I also hope more people become interested in the project. Perhaps some hybrid between a vanity address and a Bitcoin debit card would do the trick...

Perhaps calculate the difficulty of the pattern like in VanityGen and using some formula to calculate the fee for finding it.

[cambda]

On the available work, it should be noted you take 20% out of the reward published. One can assume he gets the full amount and then he will be dissapointed.

1Satoshi and its bitcoin adress 13Kc5GkEn7KZhtvN6NJw7PHHoQpopUWTyS
its already spent!
When you look at solved work,
1satoshi and its bitcoin adress 1EbuVAwRmXLLJr8w4F79B9ao9Maq4EuKrn
its not spent. I mean you have to change the bitcoin addresses


I like your Vanity Pool, it has potential for offline computers or when Bitcoin difficulty skyrockets !

[ThePiachu]

Yeah, I should take out the fees. Sorry that I haven't gotten to it yet, but I've been working on a couple other projects (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110241.0 and some others that might be revealed soon by the person that commissioned me) and just started a new job.

As for spent and not spent work - they are clearly divided. The "Bitcoin address" is a donation address, so even if someone forgets what address they were supposed to pay, or perhaps want to increase the reward later on, they would be able to do so. Sorry about this confusion as well.

I'm glad you enjoy the pool. I'm hoping that some other project would find it useful and some larger cooperation could be established to benefit both of them;).

[ThePiachu]

Okay, a quick update to the site:

• The rewards should be displaying with the fees already deducted - what you see is what you get
• Added some simple notification display for the website status and so forth

As currently our bitcoind is catching up to the network after an update to v0.7 that appears to have wiped some block history, the website might be a bit iffy.

[FLHippy]

Okay, a quick update to the site:

I have a little extra time on my hands and I code for a living. I'm an old man, I know most languages well. I could maybe attempt a true pool where users work towards a common goal and take a proportion of the reward.

I have a serious question  / concern.

How can we do this without the generator miners/server knowing the private key. Assuming a "trust no one" mentality the end user should be the only one with the private key.

[nibor]

Code to do the offline EC maths is all in:
https://www.bitaddress.org

Just need to tweak it.

Will try later to see if I can get it to work!

Ideally should be added as a tab to the existing page.

[ThePiachu]

I have a little extra time on my hands and I code for a living. I'm an old man, I know most languages well. I could maybe attempt a true pool where users work towards a common goal and take a proportion of the reward.

The Vanity Pool server is written in Go and runs on Google App Engine. I generally don't find a lot of people that write in Go. And as I mentioned earlier - the website doesn't yet get enough traffic to warrant a full pool solution :\.

I have a serious question  / concern.

How can we do this without the generator miners/server knowing the private key. Assuming a "trust no one" mentality the end user should be the only one with the private key.

Well, you can check out my testing suite:

http://gobittest.appspot.com/

and see that it can be done. There is also this topic on StackExchange:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/3853/323

Not to mention that the Vanity Pool itself never asks the payer for their private key. The wonders of ECDSA key math .

[nibor]

Have created version of bit address that makes the key stuff in the Vanity Pool easier.

See:
http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/other/address.html

Advantages are the private keys never leave your browser. It is all done locally in javascript.


Any comments and will update and then submit patch to bitaddress.org to get into master version.

[ThePiachu]

Hmm, looks promising. However, you do know that there are two ways to generate split-key vanity addresses? There is the version that requires multiplication of private keys, and one that uses addition. The latter is (most likely) less effective for generating the keys, but can still be used.

[nibor]

No.. Please explain further..

[ThePiachu]

Okay, you have the user's private and public key - PRIV and PUB. The user submits PUB to the Vanity Pool, and some miner starts crunching the numbers. There are two methods they can use:

The multiplication method - the miner takes PUB and uses that as the generation point of the ECDSA curve (instead of G specified by the curve). If they find the private key that matches (MPRIV), they submit it and the user can obtain their final private key by multiplying PRIV and MPRIV, with appropriate modulo operations.

The addition method - the miner generates a key pair as normal, using point G. Obtaining the public key, add it to the PUB and see if the result is good. If so, the user obtains their final private key by adding PRIV and MPRIV with modulo operations.

You can find out more here:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/3853/323
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=81865.msg901491#msg901491

[nibor]

So is the multiply method faster for the miner? (If not what is the advantage of it?)

And is that what oclvanityminer supports?

Thanks

[ThePiachu]

Oclvanityminer uses the multiplication method as far as I know. The multiplication method should be faster - it requires less operations, but I don't think there are any practical tests to prove that claim.

[nibor]

OK - I will update that page then. The maths is the easy bit, getting all the javascript to tie together was the difficult part!

[nibor]

Have updated to multiply. Just had to change an add to a multiply!

So now should work and users can easily generate the key to import. Please should if it does not look correct.

I will try and convince pointbiz to add to the original.

[cambda]

Have updated to multiply. Just had to change an add to a multiply!

So now should work and users can easily generate the key to import. Please should if it does not look correct.

I will try and convince pointbiz to add to the original.

Nice work but could you please generate addition and multiplycation on the same page? I believe vanitygen and oclvanitygen uses addition when using -P publickey 1pattern