Quote from: Haze on August 03, 2016, 11:48:16 PM

I think we'll find that it's very infeasible, but I (and presumably you) could not find any actual data on this which is why it makes it interesting!

This.

~1820 Rail travel at high speeds is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia. - Dionysius Lardner
~1950 "Continental drift is impossible ... young scientists shouldn't work on such a stupid idea" - MIT geology courses for undergrads
~1960 "A Proton/Neutron is indivisible" - Physics consensus
~1990 "You cannot have structures smaller than half of the light wavelength." - Physics consensus photolithography
[...]
~2016 "The DAO is safe" - slock.it

Of course one can assume the task is infeasible. And at the moment I have no indication of the contrary. On the other hand not doing something because everyone says it's infeasible seems just wrong. The list above would not seem ridiculous to us today if people were like that. If nothing else, I have learned in the past month a lot of things about efficient computation of the privkey -> pubkey -> *munge* *munge* -> address

That's why I agree with the GPU requirement. If someone could hack oclvanitygen to do certain bidding (throw out a list of uncomressed and compressed addresses for a given privkey-range), that would certainly leverage the project by at least 3 orders of magnitude.

As I started to explore how to efficiently distribute the work on several computers of mine, I did some more hacking towards a user-friendly client. I hope at least those interested in physics do like the name:

Code:

# LBC -h

   LBC - Large Bitcoin Collider v. 0.1

Usage:
   LBC [options]

Options:
   --bench
   Perform a benchmark. This will measure the time to generate one
   block of BTC addresses. Based on that information, it can
   compute the approximate ETA of the job that has been started.

   --cpus
   Set the number of CPUs to delegate address generation to. By
   default only one CPU is used. If you set 0 here, the number of
   CPUs to use is chosen automatically.

   --help/-?
   This help. Options may be abbreviated as long as they are unique.

   --pages -|'auto'
   Give the interval to work on. If 'auto' is given, the optimal chunk
   to work on is fetched.

Rico