Vanity addresses are valid bitcoin addresses that contain human-readable messages, for example 1LoveBPzzD72PUXLzCkYAtGFYmK5vYNR33 is a valid address that contains the letters forming the word "Love" as the first four Base-58 letters. Vanity addresses require generating and testing billions of candidate private keys, until one derives a bitcoin address with the desired pattern. While there are some optimizations in the vanity generation algorithm, the process essentially involves picking a private key at random, deriving the public key, deriving the bitcoin address and checking to see if it matches the desired vanity pattern, repeating billions of times until a match is found.
Once a vanity address matching the desired pattern is found, the private key from which it was derived can be used by the owner to spend bitcoins in exactly the same way as any other address. Vanity addresses are no less or more secure than any other address. They depend on the same Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) as any other address. You can no more find the private key of an address starting with a vanity pattern than you can any other address.
Once a vanity address matching the desired pattern is found, the private key from which it was derived can be used by the owner to spend bitcoins in exactly the same way as any other address. Vanity addresses are no less or more secure than any other address. They depend on the same Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) as any other address. You can no easier find the private key of an address starting with a vanity pattern than you can any other address.
In our first chapter, we introduced Eugenio, a children's charity director operating in the Philippines. Let's say that Eugenio is organizing a bitcoin fundraising drive and wants to use a vanity bitcoin address to publicize the fundraising. Eugenio will create a vanity address that starts with "1Kids", to promote the children's charity fundraiser. Let's see how this vanity address will be created and what it means for the security of Eugenio's charity.
Minh T. Nguyen
10 years ago