Vanity Pool - vanity address generator pool

[ThePiachu]

I've created a simple split vanity miner software in Google Go (if you're wondering why I used this weird language - I've been developing Bitcoin-related apps in it for a year for my master thesis). The source code and a Mac executable is available here:
https://github.com/ThePiachu/Split-Vanity-Miner-Golang
It is quite slow, checking a couple hundred addresses on my old Macbook Pro, but it can solve some reasonably short patterns. The software is streamlined for the vanity pool, you only need to change the given testnet Bitcoin address to yours and it will do most of the work. It fetches work only during the start, so keep that in mind if you want to run it for longer.

[PolymorphicAssasin]

we all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine...

I imagine a vanity address of 'polymorphic..." would be difficult [time consuming] in the extreme to generate.

[ThePiachu]

we all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine...

I imagine a vanity address of 'polymorphic..." would be difficult [time consuming] in the extreme to generate.

My estimation is, that the cost would be in the order of 1-2 million Bitcoins. When you go over 8 characters, the keys get quite expensive really fast. But then again, I don't really have much data on the cross performance of many graphic cards doing vanity generation.

[rjk]

I generated a 1freenode address (9 characters because the 1 counts as well) and it toook a day or 2 on a single 5870. The time estimate from oclvanitygen was significantly higher than that, so I may have gotten lucky. During that run I actually found 2 matching keys, and one of them happened to be all lowercase too.

[grondilu]

Sorry I haven't read the whole thread but that is basically Diffie-Hellman, right?

Anyway it sounds to me like a pretty good idea and a possibility for an additionnal business for miners.

An offline tool will be easy to write.  My Perl bitcoin library almost aready does the job.

[ThePiachu]

It is somewhat close to that algorithm, but not exact.

I'm glad you find the idea interesting. If you want to write a library to perform offline key mearging, or split-vanity-key mining, I'll put up a link to it on the website and the orIginal post. I'll have to look into writing some C++ code for that at some point...

[BurtW]

There are two ways to do this but one takes less steps inside the time critical loop so would take less time to compute each trial:

Public key addition (described above) steps

1) Generate new key pair
2) Add the generated public key to the provided public key
3) Hash and test
4) If not the vanity address match go to step 1)

Private key multiplication (described elsewhere) steps

0) Set the starting point of all key generation to the provided public key (instead of the normal point G)
1) Generate new key pair
2) Hash and test
3) If not the vanity address match go to step 1)

See how method 1) requires a larger modification to the vanity generation loop and adds a large computational step, point (public key) addition defined over the eliptical curve, into the time critical loop?

I believe that method 2) would run much faster.

After the vanity address is found the only difference between the two methods is that in method 1) the final private key is the modulo sum of the two private keys where as in method 2) is is the modulo product of the two private keys.

[ThePiachu]

Hmm, interesting, I'll have to look into that further. I guess the addition version might allow one to look for more addresses at the same time, but it probably won't be enough to compensate for the added complexity.

Adding the functionality to the site will probably be easy, I'll look into it once I have a bit of free time on my hands.

Thank you for the information!

[BurtW]

I and others have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a way to do vanity address mining in such a way that you can look for all the outstanding vanity addresse requests (all requests from all customers) with a single loop.  There are ways to do this but they all have issues.  Here is one thread to read:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56839.0

Especially this summary posting:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56839.msg679537#msg679537

Note that generating vanity addresses that start with 3 like "3vanity" will be much easier and faster than generating vanity addresses that start with 1 (like "1vanity").

I will get you a couple more threads when I get a chance.

[Luke-Jr]

Note that generating vanity addresses that start with 3 like "3vanity" will be much easier and faster than generating vanity addresses that start with 1 (like "1vanity").

Only if you bloat the blockchain with a lot of unnecessary garbage, or make hard-to-import "keys".

I've published my BIP13 (3...-addresses) branch of vanitygen.

[ThePiachu]

I and others have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a way to do vanity address mining in such a way that you can look for all the outstanding vanity addresse requests (all requests from all customers) with a single loop.

Well, it might not be that much of an issue, at least not until a lot of people will want some long vanity addresses at the same time. The option for users to share their private keys would probably be hard to do (people generally can't be bothered). One could, however, also gather orders from people who don't mind having their vanity address generated by traditional means. Those could be cheaper for example, or mined only by some trusted members of the community.

Note that generating vanity addresses that start with 3 like "3vanity" will be much easier and faster than generating vanity addresses that start with 1 (like "1vanity").

The pool already supports that (I'll have to do some input sanitisation at some point though).

[markm]

I and others have spent a lot of time trying to come up with a way to do vanity address mining in such a way that you can look for all the outstanding vanity addresse requests (all requests from all customers) with a single loop.

An address-squatter's dream, like domain names, 1-800 numbers and such... Grab a dictionary for a quick peek at initial search targets, but a list of trademarks, especially if biassed by market cap of the trademark owner, might also be useful.

A long term "investment" and maybe a more initially-expensive one than back in the days when I got windows.com, windows.org and windows.net for free on spec from the NIC and am still owed $3.50 by e-bay for their inability to find me a buyer for the matched set thus never yet actually refunded "refund" of the $3.50 they charged my credit card for trying to find a buyer.

(No wonder I have a still lingering lack of being impressed by this purportedly great auction site known as e-bay... )

-MarkM-

[grondilu]

My bash bitcoin tools has now a vanityFromPublicPoint function that implements your idea.

Exemple:

Code:

$ vanityFromPublicPoint 04234F25164361B0021E32B8A4A4043FC9A609D7810E0D2AD72674C078D99DA32D5700F2ECCBDAE9D2345E19D64BA6C628706F5FB0D4FB78E66D097D97DDF8822A "Grondi1u"

The public key must be entered as a first argument, in 04[XPOSINHEX][YPOSINHEX] format.  The target string is the second argument.

You can try the above line if you want.  Were you ever find a matching address, I might buy it to you

[ThePiachu]

The service is alive in a bare form currently. Probably this week I'll have a bit time to bring it up to par in terms of functionality and security. The main problem still remains, that there aren't really isn't is very little split-key vanity mining software. I'll try setting up a bounty for that once I get some funds...

[schnell]

Sub.
Reviews on the site will be written for freebitcoins.co.uk and free-bitcoins.net as soon as:
A. You are off testnet.
B. You have a decent ui, helping users who have no idea what you are talking about. Me, for example.

[ThePiachu]

Sub.
Reviews on the site will be written for freebitcoins.co.uk and free-bitcoins.net as soon as:
A. You are off testnet.
B. You have a decent ui, helping users who have no idea what you are talking about. Me, for example.

Thank you for that, I'll try to get something operational soon.



As for other things, I'll soon be looking into setting up a few bounties for some OpenCL split key vanity mining software, as well as some other things. I'll post details when I'll buy some more Bitcoins and write the requirements down.

Also, my test website has a new section for split private keys that use multiplication, rather than addition, you can check it out here:

http://gobittest.appspot.com/

or more specifically, here:

http://gobittest.appspot.com/VanityMult

Soon I'll add the option to the Vanity Pool website.

[bpd]

Cool idea! Look forward to seeing this get up and running.

While looking at creating a few vanity addresses of my own, I stumbled across the following transaction:

http://blockchain.info/tx-index/1187310/9a52c6325380ef34fe1e4d03202331a3937fbe420c79d7dc0f002027a9507e0f

Looks like someone is trying to first-bits squat on a bunch of vanity addresses, maybe? I don't see much other reason to do it, since there are countless addresses starting with each of these names/words, and the mixed-case makes these actual addresses not so awesome. Remains to be seen whether firstbits is important long-term or not, but I guess if you've got cycles to burn, why not?  But how do you convince the person you sell an address to that you threw away the key...? :-)

[ThePiachu]

Looks like someone is trying to first-bits squat on a bunch of vanity addresses, maybe? [...] But how do you convince the person you sell an address to that you threw away the key...? :-)

Yeah, looks like someone was shopping around for some vanity addresses. Personally I prefer using the full ones, but I guess they can be useful in tweets and what not (I even referenced to someone in one of my tweets by their firstbits, as I didn't have space for the full address;) ).

The problem with the traditional vanity key mining is exactly what you mentioned - you can't really convince anyone you really have thrown the keys away. You just have to trust the person that they won't steal your money. With the new approach you won't really have to trust anyone, which makes it so useful with Bitcoins.

[ThePiachu]

So, the bounty for a split-key vanity miner is up:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90587.0

Currently a modest 10 Bitcoins, if you want to help, you can donate some Bitcoins to:
1Cuw26gA2nhuqjBELwL6QGG89RsqfaV3v8

The Vanity Pool website has been touched up a tad and can now support multiplication split keys, protocol has been changed a little, and old vanity work has been cleaned because of that. So, check out the website and re-submit your work if you want to play around (for now):

https://vanitypooltest.appspot.com/

Hopefully things will start picking up some steam once people will start developing some vanity miners. Probably the next bounties will be for some user-friendly way of creating and handling requests for a vanity addresses, importing them and so forth, so if you want to be ahead you can start looking into it right now;).

[PinkBatman]

I'm very interested and will probably be sending some coin to the project in the future.

I have a question though, in this thread you talk about the cost to generate a vanity to a certain amount of characters. Is there a place to check something like that? Like how long/how much hashing power to generate a vanity 3 character vs. 8 characters? Or is it more complex than that?