Quote from: J35st3r on November 18, 2013, 09:38:18 AM

Quote from: brovine on November 18, 2013, 04:43:33 AM

I'm using vanitygen. I supply a public key to it and a prefix. It then finds the vanity address using said public key and provides me a partial private key. Sites like bitaddress.com can take that public key and the partial private key and determine the address. The public key itself is not enough; that returns a different address.

That functionality is intended for vanity key "farms" that calculate private keys as a service. The key combination ensures the generated key is known only by the client and not the service.

I was involved in a short discussion on this a while back so I'll link the thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=268567.0 in case its of any use to you.

...It generates a partial private key that gets converted to a public key and then added with the buyer's public key to calculate the address. Multiple sites and scripts offer this service, such as bitaddress and pybitcointools

I'd like to know the algorithm to do this so that I can do it up in PHP.