Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Vanity bitcoin addresses: a new way to keep your CPU busy
by
ByteCoin
on 07/10/2010, 23:39:10 UTC
ByteCoin: cool!  Are you finding alternative public keys for a given ECC private key?  (are there multiple public keys for a given private ECC key???  I know very little about elliptic curve cryptography)

The maths fundamentally does allow this under certain circumstances but a good implementation checks for it and only accepts the "normal" form. I imagine that the library does a good job and, even if it didn't, a patch would rapidly end such tricks.

My method involves laboriously generating  billions of new addresses every second - but how to do that best requires some thought. There's no way of distinguishing between my novelty addresses and just being very lucky when generating a normal address.

I am surprised, I wouldn't think an improvement that extreme would be possible. Your algorithm must still take exponential time as chars increase right?

Sadly yes.

If you guys want a small number of novelty addresses and are prepared to pay handsomely for them then I can generate some "manually". If there's deeper demand then I will look into automating the process but it would take a lot longer to set up. What would people pay for having the first novelty address starting with "1" and followed by the characters of their choice?

ByteCoin