Quote from: songchenwen on May 07, 2015, 07:54:48 AM

Quote from: btchris on May 06, 2015, 08:15:01 PM

Quote from: Mr. Spock on May 06, 2015, 09:25:25 AM

Are the calculations vanitygen has to perform of the same kind as bitcoin mining? Could somehow a hardware miner be used to accelerate those calculations?

They are, for the most part, very different.

Miners (partially) calculate a double SHA-256 hash of some input.

Vanitygen is based around a bunch of much slower elliptic curve based math (plus also requiring an SHA-256 calculation, which takes relative little time).

Mining ASICs would unfortunately not be useful.

Maybe some FPGA miner can help us accelerate the calculation.

It won't help too. We can use ASIC and/or FPGA if someone finds a software to convert this power which I wonder "how" and "when". If they found it, uses of ASIC and/or FPGA will increase in a great way.