I plugged this into my vanitygen and checked: 1scott

You have a 50% chance in 38 minutes at 4.61 MKeys/s
(I didn't disable my mining so it didn't run as fast as it can, 20 MKeys/s)

So doing some math that's about 4610000/71*38 minutes or 28.5 days.
And that's 50% chance.

If you want a name you can post a public key generated on bitaddress.org (save the private key!). I can use that to generate your name in 10 minutes and send you the "partial private key" which you can combine with your private key and have a secure vanity address. I'm only offering because I'm interested in trying out this new feature (third party keys) in vanitygen.

Actually the address is not the same as the public key. (The address is a hash of the public key.) You'll need to return to bitaddress and paste the private key into the wallet details tab and look at the details. It will give you a public key that is 130 chars long (the third value down).

After I posted my suggestion I realized that in order to combine the partial private key with your private key you'd need to get the keyconv utility from the vanitygen binaries zip file here,

https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen/downloads     (get v0.19 not the older 0.18)

But then if you get that then why not just run the vanitygen program yourself...
To my knowledge there isn't an online way to combine keys yet. So if you still want to do this I'm game but it may not offer much benefit unless on your system vanitygen takes many days to run. In  which case this will still save you lots of time.

Scott - now you see why I created my Java vanity application (this thread) - simplicity. It's not fast, but it's easy to use!

Generating vanity addresses is a random process. I've hit "hard" addresses in minutes, or in hours. Other generators are certainly faster than my application, but mine is simpler, especially if you're not a Bitcoin guru (yet).

It shouldn't be hard. Assuming on Windows, you unzip the binaries zip file.
Then open a command prompt (Start, Run, "cmd") and change to the correct directory.
Then type the command,

vanitygen 1scott

it should output some stats info and show you a percent progress value as it scans.

You can also do this by double-clicking an icon but you would have to make a shortcut to the exe file and set it so it opens a cmd shell.

I'm on Linux so I'm just saying this from memory (of years ago).

Anyway, offer still stands if you want to send me the public key.

BkkCoins plays hard-ball. A lot of folks would probably be angry at a "competitor" hijacking users from their thread, but I'm all for community participation. The take-away is that what many developers think is user-friendly is still way off base from actual normal users:


Yipes (and I'm a developer). Nonetheless, I'm glad you got vanitygen working for you Scott J!

The next release of my Simple Vanity app (as well as my simple VanillaWallet) will include a Windows exe (and Mac app bundle) to make it even easier to launch. Maybe someday I can even include GPU support to make it as fast as vanitygen.

This was a fun discussion! I'm always happy to have folks try my software.

Hi Mr. Mantis. Yes, it certainly does! Please refer to the OP, and the discussion, and the text on the site for clarification. As I write this, I'm trying to generate a new 4-character address and it's taking HOURS (usually only minutes for such short words).

My first goals were to make it simple and make it work. It is possible to make it faster (and remain simple), but I can't really spend the time right now... Unless there is someone interested in sponsoring (BTC) further development...

I appreciate you trying it out!

Hurray! I'm still giddy whenever any coin comes in! Every bit is much appreciated, and thank you for your encouraging words.

Just to round this off, I have found the address. I almost got to 75% probability!

Here it is: 1scottoVnKhtbLDDZwxTaEaYTzKGj4cRK

Thanks Nyhm and BkkCoins for your service and helpful posts.

Thanks to whoever sent .05 BTC to my address - I assume it was one of you guys