And even better, what if we can apply the prefix concept on hash160 too. Instead of looking for address prefix, we look for hash160 prefix. Even more speed. In fact, this would be the fastest way ever.
Won't work, rmd160 has 40 characters and by searching for their prefix, should we stop hashing half way? Meaning converting sha256 hash of public key into rmd160 but only looking for a specific prefix, either we generate the whole hash and compare with our target or we can't generate just a prefix to compare because it would break the function and we wouldn't know the result.
About brute force tools, bitcrack, vanity etc they all convert rmd160 to address, otherwise why would they accept an address as an input to check against?
Say huh?! You have it backwards. Or at least saying it backwards. Vanity takes addresses and converts to 160.
I also believe it converts the partial strings to 160 as well; I’d have to recheck on that but I’m pretty sure it does.
You know I was wondering, when I try to search for 7 char prefix by entering only 7 characters, and by searching for the full address I get the same speed and performance.
Unless programs such as vanity and bitcrack can magically turn 7 characters into a complete rmd160 hash and just search for the hash instead of address, then I can't see a reason as to why searching for full address and 7 char prefix would have the same speed.
According to you those tools decode the address we give them and then only search for the rmd160, decoding the prefix of an address gives no clue about the actual rmd160 hash of said address, therefore they all are hashing the rmd160 twice with sha256 algo in order to find the correct checksum, hence slowing down the process.
VS and KH def convert addresses to rmd160, not 100% sure about bitcrack. I also stated, "believe it converts the partial strings to 160"; you can check the code as well as I can.
Speed is the same unless you add a wildcard, then the speed drops tremendously.
The point is/was, you said, "Searching only for the public key, saves us a sha256 and rmd160 to skip." and I am saying that programs already do that, and some programs search for the rmd160 of an address, if rmd160 matches, the program checks and verifies by completing the complete address generation. So the speed up in programs, whether searching for rmd160 or xpoint, have been out for years.