A vanity address is one where you pick the first few characters and let a program grind through keys until one matches. We rewrote our glossary entry on them this week (the old one had the split-key part backwards, more on that below) and figured we should run a couple of searches ourselves instead of quoting other people’s numbers.
Setup: VanitySearch on a MacBook Pro with an M3 Max, 12 CPU threads, no GPU. About 74 million keys a second once the machine wasn’t doing anything else.
Search 1: 1LearnBTC, letter case ignored. Found 1LeArNBtcECPZj7Bd5oeNcUJnhpVddy81U after 46 minutes and about 203 billion tries. That’s half the average for the pattern, so we got a bit lucky.
Search 2: bc1qlearn8tc, exact. Found bc1qlearn8tcerg966qrqtwaelyt06fq2ze7zrsg9t after 6 hours and 1 minute and about 1.24 trillion tries. 12 percent more than average, so slightly unlucky.
Why the gap? Both patterns pick eight characters. But bech32 addresses are all lowercase, so there is no “any case” shortcut. In the legacy search most letters had two chances out of 58 to match (e or E, a or A, and so on), which cuts the work a lot. On average the bech32 job was 2.7 times bigger. The gap from 2.7x to 8x was luck. A vanity search is a lottery you keep playing until you win, and sometimes you win early.
Two things we learned writing it up:
- The bech32 alphabet has no 1, b, i or o. So bc1qlearnbtc is impossible, which is why we searched for bc1qlearn8tc instead.
- Never let a website generate a vanity address for you. Whoever generated the key can spend from it, whatever they promise. Run the tool yourself, or use split-key generation, where you keep a secret the searcher never sees. Our old entry said neither side sees the full key with split-key. That was wrong: you do, the searcher doesn’t. Fixed, and logged on our corrections page.
Full entry, free, no ads: https://www.learnbitcoin.com/glossary/vanity-address
submitted by /u/LearnBitcoinCom[link] [comments]