Creating Custom Bitcoin Addresses with Vanitygen

Vanitygen is a tool for generating personalized bitcoin addresses using command-line. No more jumbled letters for me, I want something that stands out like 1stDownqyMHHqnDPRSfiZ5GXJ8Gk9dbjL.

Wait, does it really generate like 23k addresses every second? And it took 80k tries for that address?!

Yep, exactly! Crazy fast, right?

Wow, I couldn’t even get to 1,000/sec with my patched client. Is that how it usually is?

Just fixed a bug, it’s working fine now. Could you give it another shot? Your speed is normal. The patch was just churning random keys until luck hit. Your code is way better since it’s only doing one EC addition per try.

What kind of entropy does it use anyway?

It grabs time from Linux and the process PID when it creates keys. Standard stuff for OpenSSL programs. It adds new entropy every million keys or so, so it's pretty secure.

I’m waiting for a GPU miner for vanity addresses. That would be sweet.

Imported keys now show up right away in the GUI. Big thanks to sipa!

I got a system with dual CPUs. My original setup uses both, but vanitygen seems to only use one. Can’t figure out why.

It would be cool to have an estimated time for finding a match based on the rate.

Awesome work! Been running a bash script for days and still no luck finding a simple address like ^1Abcd. Also had trouble compiling it but figured out I needed libpcre3.

This entropy method is weak. A hacker could exploit that easily. Should use /dev/random or pull in bits from hotbits or random.org.

Definitely a pain when your name has illegal base58 characters.

Would you even use this if it had an option to fetch private keys from better sources like /dev/random? Happy to add it if it makes it safer.

Thanks a lot! Really appreciate it!

I think there’s something off with the generate_address_regex() function. Looks like it’s calculating incorrectly.

Try using vanitygen -r [Ww]iLL, you don’t need to worry about [Ii] or [Ll] since those aren't in base58.

I think I might be hitting a bug or just using regex wrong. My command missed some letters.

Yeah, that’s definitely a bug! The search loop isn’t generating the test code right. I’ll fix it soon.