Decentralized Vanity Address Generation Pool

Just set up a mining pool to make vanity addresses risk-free. You can create one without needing to know the private key. Check this out if you're curious about how it works.

Sounds awesome!

New biz idea alert! Where can I throw some cash?

All donations are appreciated! Here's my address: 1B98qJ1NT6BNdnGp1fgCshAvWP8i4grdy7

Yeah for real, if this works maybe it's time for some investments. You could need funding for hardware or updates on the software, right? Seems like there's a solid market for it as more ppl learn about Bitcoin.

The pool runs using Google App Engine and my node's on Amazon, so I'm not spending much on hardware. Software will take time to improve, but I'm not too business-savvy, so handling investments might slow me down. What do you think I should do?

Not much of a businessman myself either. Maybe go for a stock offering? But like you said, that might just complicate things right now. I'll just send you some BTC when I can to test it out.

Gotta give props to ThePiachu, but he's not exactly breaking new ground. The idea of outsourcing vanity address creation isn't new. I see this going open-source soon, so monetization could be tricky.

It’s about more than just software, the success of this biz will hinge on having the right hardware for scaling things up.

Exactly, ThePiachu wants to establish a pool for others to join in mining, not just for himself. Running a pool is different from just mining or making hardware.

This is cool! If we get oclvanitygen to back this up, we can repurpose all those old GPUs now that ASICs are taking over.

It might take off if a lot of people suddenly want fancy addresses and are willing to pay. But I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.

Nice, I just added a link to this in my thread!

Wait, my math isn’t great, but how does that private key relate to the pattern "166"? The address made doesn’t have that in it. The math checks out, but I’m confused on how this was done with vanitygen.

Check this link for clarity. When you combine two specific private keys, the resulting one does map to '166'. Currently, vanitygen cannot handle that kind of operation, but I'm looking into creating something that can.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Subscribed!

Honestly, I still believe using something like namecoin for an address namespace is a better long-term solution compared to vanity addresses, but these are fun to play with right now. Can we charge based on the time it takes to find keys?

As of now, there's no pricing based on key size. It's something we could explore later if there's enough demand. I need to test some split-vanity-mining software first and might include details in my thesis eventually.

Is that address starting with m valid?

Oh, that’s a testnet address. You can mess around with fake Bitcoins there. Just to play it safe!