Find bitcoin address using just a few letters

I've been diving into Bitcoin lately, even though I’m a bit late to the party. It got me thinking about how newcomers like me can pitch in. I read this post where the writer hid some characters from their address but kept the rest visible, and it made me wonder: can you actually retrieve the full address from just that partial info? I tried to find a tool for that online but came up empty. Now, I'm thinking about building such a service myself. Are there any tools out there that do something like this? My plan is to create a system that constantly scans all Bitcoin addresses that have been involved in at least one transaction and stores them without duplicates. Then, I’d set up an easy-to-use interface where people can type in partial characters of a Bitcoin address and get back all addresses that include those characters. The more characters they provide, the quicker and more precise the results will be. This is my main project right now (unless something like it is already out there), and I’m all in on it, no matter how long it takes. Plus, working on this will help keep me motivated to learn more. I’d really appreciate any tips or info you guys can share.

If the address has been used, it's publicly visible on the blockchain. I use grep on this data to find an address: List of all Bitcoin addresses with a balance List of all Bitcoin addresses ever used Years ago, I found a site that does this, but I don't know any at the moment.

Walletexplorer does that but it's mainly for tracing linked addresses, searching with the first few characters of an address is just an added feature. But for some reason, I can't access the site right now. BTW, the more popular term for that is "firstbits".

Some people black out parts of their address on a screenshot, and only the first part isn't enough to find it: Example: 1NXYoJ5xU91Jp83XfVMHwwTUyZFK64BoAD To find all matching addresses:

https://mempool.space/ might work if you know some character in the beginning.

This is basically what the OP is trying to do. However,  mempool.space searches only for the first characters, not characters in the middle or in the end of the address.

Or, if you're willing to put a bit of effort into learning how to use Regular Expressions (regex): ^ indicates the beginning of the line .* is used to match any piece you're missing $ indicates end of the line.

That's better indeed. I use pipes because I'm too lazy to think about regexes.

I had no idea of this before now, good I came across this post now I’ll love to know more. Is there a reason for obscuring the address, is it for security reasons or something else. And I’m seeing some of the legends post with something like a code I’ll like to know more. Please can someone give me a detailed explanation

FirstBits was a method used to shorten the address, and you can give someone lets say the first 10 characters and they can identify your address. The way this works is that the service will label each address with its unique prefix; For example, if my address is 1abcdefg, and there is already 3 other addresses that is given the FirstBits of 1a, 1ab, 1abc then I'll get 1abcd as my first bits. The caveat of this is that it'll still be pretty ambiguous as the number of unique addresses on the blockchain grows. In addition, this also encourages address reuse which is more than enough of a reason this doesn't have much utility nowadays. Note that it is never an official implementation but it was a nifty service back in the days.

No intelligible reasons to it. I mean, if you want to show an address, display it without any obstruction and if you don't want to show the address but you have to post an example, then just show another address or replace most of the characters. There are scenarios like the user has to show a screenshot with the owner's address, But in that case, just cover the whole address completely or just leave the first three characters to show that it's an address. People who did that are probably thinking that it's doing something for their privacy. Most of those posts with partially obscured address that I came across usually has replies hinting that they already knew the address despite the intention of the OP to hide it.

Download list of Bitcoin addresses from blockchair.com and do your data filtering. https://gz.blockchair.com/bitcoin/addresses/ https://gz.blockchair.com/bitcoin/addresses/blockchair_bitcoin_addresses_latest.tsv.gz