Vanity Pool a pool for generating vanity addresses

So I've set up a kind of "mining pool" that lets you create vanity addresses without needing to trust anyone. If you're curious about how it works, check these links: http://vanitypool.appspot.com/ http://gobittest.appspot.com/VanityAll https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Address_Utility The main site is running at: http://vanitypool.appspot.com/ Now, let me break it down: The cool part is that you can generate a vanity address without even knowing the private key it will use. One person creates a random ECDSA keypair and keeps the private key to themselves. They can then request a vanity address by giving the public key, the pattern they want, and so on. Another person tries to find that vanity address by brute-forcing random ECDSA private keys, getting the corresponding public keys, adding them to the provided public key, and then going through SHA, RIPEMD, and base58 until they hit the desired pattern. Once they find it, they hand over the private key they discovered to the first person, who combines the two private keys to create the vanity address. The best part? The one searching for the solution has no idea what the final private key is! This means you can get your vanity key generated without trusting any third party. Here's an example (from the gobittest site): We have a private key: 18E14A7B6A307F426A94F8114701E7C8E774E7F9A47E2C2035DB29A206321725 which corresponds to the public key.

Great Idea!

And a new Bitcoin Business model was born. Where do I invest?

Donations are always welcome;): 1B98qJ1NT6BNdnGp1fgCshAvWP8i4grdy7

I mean INVEST... like if you've solved this problem, someone needs to be throwing money at you to buy hardware and further develop this proprietary software for a promise in sharing future profits. Maybe I'm wrong, but I see a big demand for this kind of service as Bitcoin awareness spreads.

The pool is running on Google App Engine and my Bitcoind runs on Amazon EC2, so my hardware costs are non-existant. As for software, I probably can create some basic solutions easily enough with enough time and put up some bounties for more sophisticated ones. I'm generally not that much of a business type, so trying to handle possible investments could only hamper this little project for now. What sort of model of investing did you have in mind?

I dunno, I'm not much of a business person either. But I would imagine some type of stock issuance would be a start. But that would require some kind of incorporation and like you said, probably a huge hindrance to you at this point. For now, I'm happy to send you some Bitcoins when I have some time to try out the service.

Kudos to ThePiachu but it's not like he invented anything new. The theoretical basis for outsourcing vanity address generation has existed for a while and he just started a project to get the ball rolling. One way or another this will end up as a FLOSS platform so there's not much monetization potential. Looking forward to the advent of compatible miners.

There's more to it than software. The key to success for a business venture like this will be the backend hardware that allows for mass production and fulfilment.

ThePiachu's point is to create a pool for other miners to participate in, not (or not only) to do the mining himself. Running a mining pool is distinct from running mining hardware, which itself is distinct from developing hardware.

This is cool, now all we need is oclvanitygen to support this so that we can use all the video cards that will soon be obsolete now that ASICs are coming along.

Well, this might be viable if suddenly a lot of people would want really fancy addresses and they were willing to pay up for them. It probably won't happen, but it might encourage a few people to go for a vanity address that normally wouldn't.

Cool! I added a link to this in the OP of my thread.

Sorry for my terrible math, but how is that private key a solution to the pattern "166"? That private key makes the address 12gFLYWpfnDTQ3JB5w5VDPpF5JQZnA1g1c it doesn't have 166 in it. The math doesn't lie and if you add the two private keys together you do get an address with "166" in it, but where did this one come from? How would one do this with vanitygen?

Check out this page: http://gobittest.appspot.com/Vanity When you add 18E14A7B6A307F426A94F8114701E7C8E774E7F9A47E2C2035DB29A206321725 and B18427B169E86DE681A1A62588E1D02AE4A7E83C1B413849989A76282A7B562F their sum becomes CA65722CD418ED28EC369E36CFE3B7F3CC1CD035BFBF6469CE759FCA30AD6D54 which maps to 166ev9JXn2rFqiPSQAwM7qJYpNL1JrNf3h Currently you can't do these operations with vanitygen, but I'll look into making a tool for the generation soon. Basically, one would need to make a modified vanitygen that would add a predefined public key to a generated keypair before proceeding with calculating the Bitcoin address. It's a fairly simple modification, but I'm not fluent enough in vanitygen's source code to make it.

Something I have thought about doing for a long time.  Subscribe.

I still think an address namespace in namecoin (or something similar) is a better long term solution than vanity addresses, but they are fun for now. Is there some way to charge based on how long the key took to find?  Like what if you set the price equal to whatever you would made mining BTC?

For now the service doesn't charge based on key length. It can be implemented if there is a need for it. I'd have to benchmark some split-vanity-mining software on some various hardware first in order to determine how much should one be charging. I've done it for normal vanity mining (details will be available in my master thesis that I'll probably post on the forum eventually). Personally, I'd have to first check whether looking for multiple keys at the same time will slow the process down considerably, or will it not be too noticeable. Generally I'd like to leave a lot of freedom to the miners to discriminate themselves which tasks pay enough for them to undertake them (this is why the bounty is listed along with the task).

Is that address correct? Starting by m?

It's a testnet address: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet Means you can play with fake-Bitcoins, just in case something goes wrong with the system. You can get some testnet bitcoins here: http://testnet.freebitcoins.appspot.com/ They are free.