Do Vanity Address Generators hurt bitcoin?

[Flashman]

A random address collision is a bit more likely than you'd think, but given the size of the address range, still bloody unlikely. To get a handle on that, see... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

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[LOBSTER]

Also they are not wasting these addresses. Everyone else can generate the same address again (It's indeed unlikely, but possible).

[michaeladair]

Also they are not wasting these addresses. Everyone else can generate the same address again (It's indeed unlikely, but possible).

Does it not bug you at all that someone can generate the same address as another person. However unlikely it is, it's still possible.

[ensurance982]

What people don't seem to get is that those addresses are not being 'registered' anywhere or taken out of the pool free for people to take.

If you generate a new address, you just pick a random private key and see which address this key controls (easily computable), which is then your Bitcoin address. (The opposite isn't possible, at least there is no known method as of now) This is one of the things that make Bitcoin safe.

[jonald_fyookball]

Yes but what no one mentioned so far is that vanity addresses may not be
nearly as random or collision resistant as normal addresses.  For that
reason, some people don't advocate them.

They don't hurt Bitcoin, but I doubt they are the highest security
addresses.

[Elwar]

Also they are not wasting these addresses. Everyone else can generate the same address again (It's indeed unlikely, but possible).

Does it not bug you at all that someone can generate the same address as another person. However unlikely it is, it's still possible.

VanityGen generates random numbers. These all already exist.

VanityGen does not do anything.

You need to send bitcoin to an address for that address to be put into use on the blockchain.

You could generate a billion addresses per second, they would not go onto the blockchain.

[ensurance982]

Yes but what no one mentioned so far is that vanity addresses may not be
nearly as random or collision resistant as normal addresses.  For that
reason, some people don't advocate them.

They don't hurt Bitcoin, but I doubt they are the highest security
addresses.

Well, do you've got any proof of that? I mean, they're merely the result of a hashing function (applied multiple times) to an input that may or may not be random. There would have to be a connection between addresses with certain characteristics (preferred in vanity addresses) and the input of the hashing function.

[jonald_fyookball]

I have no proof whatsoever, I just thought I heard something about there being a risk.
I guess if they are just hashing and throwing away everything that's not the chosen  vanity
its cool, but i thought it was more complicated than that.

[needFREElunch]

What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.

Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.

No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

[ensurance982]

What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.

Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.

No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

Well, effectively he is right, you could just tell your vanity-generator (or whatnot) to look for that address's private key, but it would effectively be futile since the chances are astronomically low of succeeding (like, really low... Not even worth trying)

[michaeladair]

What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.

Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.

No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

Well, effectively he is right, you could just tell your vanity-generator (or whatnot) to look for that address's private key, but it would effectively be futile since the chances are astronomically low of succeeding (like, really low... Not even worth trying)

With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...

[ensurance982]

What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.

Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.

No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

Well, effectively he is right, you could just tell your vanity-generator (or whatnot) to look for that address's private key, but it would effectively be futile since the chances are astronomically low of succeeding (like, really low... Not even worth trying)

With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...

First of all: RAM doesn't help you much with performing SHA256 hashs. 800+ keys/s are nothing.
Imagine there are 100m Addresses in use with bitcoins in them (Which is genereous, as of now). Hell, say there are 1b addresses in use, even! There are 2 ^ 160 possible addresses (1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976). To find the key to one address that is in use, you'd statistically still have to calculate 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655 addresses.
Let's say you want this done in 50 years (finding a collision), you'd have to calculate 926878258073885666034807732569 addresses/s. For 50 years non-stop.
But then again, my calculations may be off... 

[DeathAndTaxes]

What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

+1 for a creative way to answer something asked for the 157,248th time.

[newIndia]

What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

+1 for a creative way to answer something asked for the 157,248th time.

off-topic: +1 to see U back again.

Most of the people thought u were the best poster of 2014 => https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=907916.0

Where were u have been for so long ?

[Soros Shorts]

With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...

Instead of posting the silly picture of the star again, here is a link to a Bruce Schneier article about how a supernova has only enough energy to theoretically cycle through a 219-bit counter (and no energy left to do any additional computation).

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/the_doghouse_cr.html

[needFREElunch]

What about how all the electric freezers have been using up all the snowflake designs wastefully since early in the 20th Century, when nature runs out of unique designs, it might just drop huge chunks of ice on us.

Incorrect analogy, but it gets the point across.
Its not as if any address generated prevents it being from generated again, its that it is so unlikely. Tomorrow you may generate an address and see it has got 20000 BTCs in it, but don't keep hoping for it.

Couldn't you just set yours to search for an address of like an exhange or whatnot? Even though it'd take a long ass time.

No. Vanity addresses contain only a short word or phrase (a phrase would actually be very expensive to generate). Each additional length you want your vanity address to be will be exponentially more difficult to generate (I believe it is to the 34th power, but I may be mistaken on this).

Well, effectively he is right, you could just tell your vanity-generator (or whatnot) to look for that address's private key, but it would effectively be futile since the chances are astronomically low of succeeding (like, really low... Not even worth trying)

With the fast rising power of technology, who's to say that in 10 years home computers will begin to have 20+ GB of ram... I mean, that could effectively sort through about 800+keys/s. In the future, couldn't it very well be possible to search for a key and get it? If Technology keeps its constant rise...

If current ASIC technology were to be modified slightly then it would be possible to check trillions of private keys every second for only a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment. The chances of finding a specific private key to a btc address are still very small

[tss]

regular address generators also produce tons of unused addresses except much quicker.

[jwcastle]

Back in the 70's they thought two digits for the Year field is all anyone needed. Use 2 bytes instead of 4 and save a ton of memory. When Y2K came around, people panicked.

The Unix doomsday is Jan 19, 2038, when Unix time rolls over to 00000000000000.  Someone decided that a double precision data type is all they needed (8 bytes) for Unix time. When 2038 comes around, everyone will be scrambling again.

FAT file system allowed for storage devices up to 4GB. Who's ever going to use for than 4GB? That's an unheard of amount of memory back in 1980 when 10MB hard drives cost $2000 and floppy disks were the norm.

Oh wait, 4GB isn't enough. Let's make FAT32 with a limit of 2TB.  No one will ever use 2TB on a home computer.

Oh no! 2TB isn't that much after all. Let's go to NTFS.  What's the limit on NTFS? I haven't had time to look it up.

Mistakes after mistakes have been made and will continue to be made. Although it seems that Bitcoin addresses are nearly infinite, there still is a limit. While that limit cannot be reasonably achieved right now, that may change in the future.

[jonald_fyookball]

Back in the 70's they thought two digits for the Year field is all anyone needed. Use 2 bytes instead of 4 and save a ton of memory. When Y2K came around, people panicked.

The Unix doomsday is Jan 19, 2038, when Unix time rolls over to 00000000000000.  Someone decided that a double precision data type is all they needed (8 bytes) for Unix time. When 2038 comes around, everyone will be scrambling again.

FAT file system allowed for storage devices up to 4GB. Who's ever going to use for than 4GB? That's an unheard of amount of memory back in 1980 when 10MB hard drives cost $2000 and floppy disks were the norm.

Oh wait, 4GB isn't enough. Let's make FAT32 with a limit of 2TB.  No one will ever use 2TB on a home computer.

Oh no! 2TB isn't that much after all. Let's go to NTFS.  What's the limit on NTFS? I haven't had time to look it up.

Mistakes after mistakes have been made and will continue to be made. Although it seems that Bitcoin addresses are nearly infinite, there still is a limit. While that limit cannot be reasonably achieved right now, that may change in the future.

Perhaps, but do you realize that if the hashpower of the entire bitcoin network were spent on creating addresses , it would take over 21 trillion years to generate 2^128 addresses?

[barwizi]

Quite right, 2 days and i generated ~50 million addresses using a single machine (still haven't imported them) now, with 1000 machines that would be 25 billion addresses a day, 10k computers would make that 250 billion address a day. 250 000 000 000 is still very minute in regard tthe total  ? 2^96 , but we must always remember that number is a theoretical limit. there is no guarantee that if we  could, we would end up with the exact number or anything remotely in the range. As the number passes a certain mark , it becomes more likely that a collision will occur. And the more we keep going the higher the frequency of collisions because address generation is not a straight line.

Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision, but i think that the exaggeration of  terms needs to stop. We are talking about general purpose CPUs and trying to use their capabilities as a metric to measure what we can do, which is wrong because maybe soon, someone is going to go for that Vanity ASIC which as you know has the potential to really change the game by massive magnitudes.