BurtW - you misunderstand me.
I am simply creating billions of addresses with their private keys using Vanitygen. Then checking them against a stored list. I am not trying to go backwards, or break any kind of encryption. I'm just hoping for a match at some point. In my lifetime, preferably.
Point is, I am "reducing" the name space I am searching by specifying:
1) The first 3 chars of the address: 12g
2) The range of addresses I want to match.
It's not much of a reduction, and I'll have to be lottery-winning lucky, but you know what? It runs on my machine 24/7, and it's fine. If it hits, it hits.
What I want is for one of the mathematicians on the forum to explain why EKs approach is any more efficient than mine. As far as I can see, he can only compare a few million keys from a rendezvous point. He can do it very quickly, I grant that, but give me better hardware and I can generate more keys in Vanitygen too
Anyhow, mine is the crudest possible type of attack.
But I still don't see much of a difference between this and EKs. And when you get into the numbers, I'll bet that the advantage he has is microscopically insignificant. Anyone care to calculate it?
Rit./
Vanitygen just generates private keys randomly, which are converted deterministically to pub keys and addresses. Unless those hashes and ECC were broken, you're not reducing your search space by specifying that you want Vanitygen to store the addresses that start with 1xyzabc. In other words, there's no way to tell Vanitygen to "only make priv keys that get you addresses near 1xyzabc...".
Unfortunately for your wife, yours is just a brute-force method.
Definitely ask her to tell you
every possible number, phrase, and character that she may have used for her brain wallet. There's no other way about it.
I am not a math wiz on this but while we are comparing futile efforts to "win the lottery" with bitcoin I am curious if someone can work out this math.
Is it possible to calculate how many addresses in the keyspace will start with a certain prefix. For example the address 1933phfhK3ZgFQNLGSDXvqCn32k2buXY8a has over 100k bitcoins on it. If your using vanitygen or some other such tool and generating keys with a target of 1933 how big is that subset of addresses that will begin with that prefix? Are we talking only 2 lifetimes of the universe instead of 10?
Just curious, this is interesting stuff.
You're misunderstanding Vanitygen in the same way that Rit is. There's no way of knowing which private key will get you address that starts with a preordained string of characters.
For example, observe how different the addresses are even of very closely related private keys in this list:
http://www.directory.io/That's the point of the cryptography; you get no information about where to look for the private key if you're only given the address.
