Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 2 from 2 users
Topic OP
Vanity address scam rising
by
aysg76
on 04/03/2021, 14:30:07 UTC
⭐ Merited by DdmrDdmr (1) ,Heisenberg_Hunter (1)
The idea of generating Bitcoin address with some character or string of your choice instead of generating random string of characters is known as Vanity address which was first introduced by Vanitygen who produces address taking inputs from you and giving results on that basis.The amount of time required to find a given pattern depends on how complex the pattern is, the speed of the computer, whether it is using CPU or GPU, and if you get lucky.

There are many mining pools who take fees from you for you desired Bitcoin addresses as they have more computing power dedicated to the network instead of individuals computing power

It is a costly and time consuming process  :


Average time taken to crack address

But in recent time these type of scams has grown and hacker are fooling people by generating fake vanity address in name of big organisations and people to lure people to donate to that particular address as most of them don't remember full length of address as its mixture of lower and upper case and integers. A recent report states such scam

Fake vanity address in name of Elon Musk and Spacex accused of
$2 million scam


So is it profitable for hackers and how much easy it is generate such vanity address? And its cannot be done by a single individual because it's require much processing power and other things.So what are your thoughts on this?