In this article we will go through the steps of creating a personalized or so called vanity Bitcoin wallet address. Vanity address is an address containing pre-defined name or numbers in the beginning. If you are new here, you might want to read one of our previous articles on “How to register anonymous domain and pay with Bitcoin” as it has some info about popular Bitcoin resources and wallets.
Advantages and disadvantages
Before we proceed one might wonder about advantages and disadvantages of a personalized Bitcoin address. For example, lets look at address: 1yohostrzC4cWtvvVNFjkaHZBdkv6BnkM. One clear advantage is that this address can be easily memorized recognized. For example, you can add recipients to your wallet and you will always know to whom which address belongs. One can create addresses like 1mine, 1wifey, 1biz etc.
There is also a disadvantage – anyone can create an address with exact same first word and can use it in malicious purpose. So, even with vanity address the sender of the payment should always carefully verify the address of the recipient if the payment is done manually not through the payment gateway.
Howto (Windows)
Let’s get down to the process of creating a personalized address.
- Download and extract VanitySearch – https://github.com/JeanLucPons/VanitySearch/releases
- Run
cmd cd C:\– Change to directory where VanitySearch.exe is located. In our case it’s root of drive C:\- Run command
VanitySearch.exe -stop -gpu 1yohostIn the example above we are looking for the address which starts with “1yohost“. On the Picture 1 below you can see how the process looks like.
In our example we have 50% probability to find the address we want in 4 minutes with the checking speed of ~2k addresses per second. On the Picture 2 below you can see the result of our search.
Public address is a vanity Bitcoin wallet address. Priv (p2pkh) is a private key to this address. IMPORTANT: Never ever share private key, the one who owns private key, owns funds on this particular wallet.
Some statistics
Obviously, the longer your predefined part of the wallet address is, the more time it will take to search for this address. For example, if you decide to find a private key to one of the Satoshi Nakomoto Bitcoin addresses – 1HLoD9E4SDFFPDiYfNYnkBLQ85Y51J3Zb1, it will take roughly 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years with 50% chance. Below you can see some estimates with 2Gkeys per second.
- 1-4 letters/numbers – instant;
- 5 letters/numbers – few seconds;
- 6 letters/numbers – ~5 minutes;
- 7 letters/numbers – ~4 hours with 50% probability;
- 8 letters/numbers – 10 days with 50% probability;
- 9 letters/numbers – 1.5 years with 50% probability;
- 10 letters/numbers – 90 years with 50% probability.
Now when you have the estimates, you can go ahead and test your luck 🙂
