Could someone help me with how I could make a "vanity address"? I heard you can have a computer generate it with the letters you want yourself the address to have. But don't really understand how that would be possible to do. And how you would get your private key?
Sorry I'm sort of new here.
They way vanity addresses are generated is to run a program that generates random private keys and then calculates the addresses from the private keys. If repeats this process as fast as it can comparing each address to what you want it to look like until it finds what you're looking for.
There are a few programs available to do this. As devthedev said, it would help to know what operating system you are using.
The more letters or numbers that you want to match, the longer it will take until the program finds a matching address.
If you just want to match the first letter of the address (after the 1), you will find a match on average in 1 out of every 58 addresses that you generate.
If you want to match the first two letters, you'll find a match on average 1 out of every 3400 addresses that you generate.
If you want to match the first three letters, you'll find a match on average 1 out of every 195000 addresses that you generate.
If you want to match the first four letters, you'll find a match on average 1 out of every 11.3 million addresses that you generate.
If you want to match the first five letters, you'll find a match on average 1 out of every 660 million addresses that you generate.
If you want to match the first five letters, you'll find a match on average 1 out of every 38 billion addresses that you generate.
As you can see, it quickly gets very difficult (and time consuming) to find an address that matches many letters.
Thanks for the explanation. Is this a program that everyone could learn how to use and maybe run on their own PC? As asked above I'm using Windows 7.
This does sound complicated. Can I use my gpu to do this like with mining?