Do Vanity Address Generators hurt bitcoin?

[jonald_fyookball]

  2^96 

Where did you get 2^96 from?

[bitcreditscc]

  2^96 

Where did you get 2^96 from?

I've seen that number somewhere too

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

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.

That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.

[minerpumpkin]

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.

Well, you can extrapolate the increase of hashing power or power used to calculate Bitcoin addresses (effectively hashing, yeah) pretty easily and more or less reliably, though. The limits of those file systems were also due to certain limitations that made sense at that time.

[bitcreditscc]

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.

That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.

I just tried out my pc a few seconds. How many minutes does it take to generate 1 GB of valid addresses? And if i import them, how big should i expect my wallet file to be? I have a free 4 TB drive and would like to test this out.

[minerpumpkin]

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.

That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.

I just tried out my pc a few seconds. How many minutes does it take to generate 1 GB of valid addresses? And if i import them, how big should i expect my wallet file to be? I have a free 4 TB drive and would like to test this out.

4 TB ~= 4,000,000,000,000 Byte = 32,000,000,000,000 Bit. If you only store the addresses (thus, know which ones you've generated in a reasonable amount of time) and there are 2^160 possible addresses: 32,000,000,000,000 / 160 = 200,000,000,000 Addresses. Not that much.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

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.

That is pretty slow. My custom non-vanity address generator does 30 million address generations per core per second. To anyone thinking wow, no this is still orders of magnitude slower.

Barwizi, even if somebody could generate trillions of addresses per second, it is still going to take too long. Not to mention that at trillions of addresses, you no longer have the space to hold them, let alone import them.

I just tried out my pc a few seconds. How many minutes does it take to generate 1 GB of valid addresses? And if i import them, how big should i expect my wallet file to be? I have a free 4 TB drive and would like to test this out.

4 TB ~= 4,000,000,000,000 Byte = 32,000,000,000,000 Bit. If you only store the addresses (thus, know which ones you've generated in a reasonable amount of time) and there are 2^160 possible addresses: 32,000,000,000,000 / 160 = 200,000,000,000 Addresses. Not that much.

Well, there are still ~2^256 possible private keys, or 2^96 private keys per address(according to the forum), anyone attempting this better have a whole galaxy of those Superman data crystals, in addition to a quantum computer + time machine.

[Fernandez]

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.

Its the same problem, breaking a specific address is impossible with current equipment and in the foreseeable future.

If you're interested, you might try breaking 1CounterpartyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXUWLpVr for a start.

[jonald_fyookball]

Don't get me wrong, you have a higher chance of winning the lottery 5 times than you do getting a collision,
Well, there are still ~2^256 possible private keys, or 2^96 private keys per address(according to the forum), anyone attempting this better have a whole galaxy of those Superman data crystals, in addition to a quantum computer + time machine.

correct me if I'm wrong but that doesn't mean there's necessarily 2^96 private keys available for any given address, it's just an average based on 2^256 divided by 2^160.

 anyway this number 2^96 isn't useful since there's no way to know which is the set of 2^96.  brute force by generating private keys would require searching all 2^256.  brute forcing by generating addresses would require 2^160 tries... and brute forcing the ECDSA based on a known public key would require 2^128 operations.

[Bitcoin_BOy$]

before generate all bitcoin adresses in one 1000 years you can mine all bitcoin+altcoins with that power in 0.0001 seconde