Vanity Pool
FAQ
I encountered an error and can't submit my solution. What should I do?
If you encounter an error that prevents you from submitting your work, please contact us with the appropriate solution and your reward address. We will check what is wrong and compensate the first person to report a problem with the appropriate private key solving a given work for the reward that they could not claim (provided the work was not solved prior to the message being sent). Please make sure to include the solution, otherwise we won't be able to compensate you for your work. Please also check that your solution is in proper format (see below).
I tried submitting a solution but it doesn't work, what's wrong?
Please make sure you are not trying to submit a solution in the Wallet Import Format format (like 5HueCGU8rMjxEXxiPuD5BDku4MkFqeZyd4dZ1jvhTVqvbTLvyTJ). The Pool only takes solutions in a form of hexadecimal private keys (like 0C28FCA386C7A227600B2FE50B7CAE11EC86D3BF1FBE471BE89827E19D72AA1D). If you submit your solutions in WIF, you are likely to receive an error message.
What is the status of this website?
Currently we are in a beta period - the system should work just fine, but errors can occur. Please keep this in mind. Coin loss can occur, but it is not likely.
What is this website?
This website is an equivalent to a mining pool for creating Bitcoin vanity addresses. It allows multiple people to try creating a safe vanity addresses, so as to make the process efficient.
What are those Bitcoins you speak of?
You ought to check out this website. This website is dealing with a bit advanced concepts, so you really should start there.
What are vanity addresses?
Vanity addresses is a Bitcoin address that has a desirable pattern - name of a company, your nickname, etc. The main problem with vanity addresses, is that in order to create them, one has to brute force a lot of addresses.
How does this differ from other vanity address generators?
This website aims to generate vanity addresses without the need to trust a third party. This is done by using the properties of the ECDSA algorithm. Instead of using one private key, two are used. One is owned by you and never revealed to anyone, the second is the solution to your problem that can be broadcasted publicly. When you add them together, you get your vanity address. The trick is, one can generate this vanity address by knowing just your public key (which is safe to broadcast). For more info, check out the Stack Exchange.
What is the catch?
There is no catch. You are only required to pay a fee that will be used to reward the person that generates your vanity address. We charge a percentage of that reward to keep our service running.
What are the fees and how much do you charge?
At the moment the minimum fee is 0.01BTC, and the pool is charging 20% of the reward to keep our servers running. We are planning on lowering our cut in the future, when we will build up enough popularity.
How quickly do I need to pay?
Old unpaid address requests are removed within a week or two of them being created.
How can I get started?
If you want to buy a vanity address, just request it with this form. You will need to provide us with a public key of an ECDSA keypair you own (keep your private key safe), your desired pattern, and what network you are using. You will then be prompted to pay a fee. After we process that transaction, your request will be displayed for everyone to see. Anyone can then try generating your address, and if they succeed, they can claim your reward. After that, the solved work will be moved here.
Why do I need to log in?
There are two reasons for that - later we want to implement email notifications of solved work (so you won't have to be checking the page manually). The login page is also used to prevent bots requesting addresses. This website is for humans ;).
How do I get the private key for my vanity address?
For now, this technology is so fresh, that there are no offline solutions for this. However, for testing purposes we do offer our other website where you can combine your private keys. It does support https and we don't peek at what is inputted there, but this is your money we are talking about here, use for testing only.
Other online service providing split-key address combination is bitaddress
For offline address combination, we recommend Bitcoin Address Utility by Casascius
If you want to implement a tool yourself, check out the Stack Exchange.
How do I mine for vanity addresses?
In order to mine for vanity addresses, you can check out the related topic on BitcoinTalk, or just use the oclvanityminer developed by samr7. When more software will become available, we will advertise them on this website. For future reference - you can either check out the available work area and get required info manually, or use our automated work display page without any unnecessary padding (good for automatic tools). The format is as follows:
Pattern:PublicKey:NetworkByte:Reward;Comment
Each entry is displayed in a new line. Currently comments are not used, but they might be in the future. You can submit the solved work either on the work page, or by using HTML POST to this page with parameters:
key - equal to "Pattern:PublicKey" (without quotations)
privateKey - equal to the private key that is the solution to the problem
bitcoinAddress - equal to the Bitcoin address you want to claim the reward with
If the solution is accepted, "OK!" will be returned, otherwise an error message will be displayed. If you provide a proper key, but there will be some problem with the address or something else, the solution will not be saved (and thus, you will have a chance to claim it properly). This is done to ensure that everyone is paid for their due work.
What is the lavishness, mining ratio and all that jargon?
Lavishness is a measurement of how profitable mining for a vanity address is. It takes into account how complex the searched pattern is,
as well as the size of the bounty it has.
Mining ratio is the ratio that determines how many times vanity mining is more profitable than traditional mining.
Having the following variables:
L - lavishness
MR - mining ratio
b - vanity address bounty (in Bitcoins)
c - vanity address complexity
d - block difficulty
r - block reward (in Bitcoins)
k - key generation rate (in keys per second)
m - mining speed (in hashes per second)
We can calculate:
L = 2^32 * (b/c)
MR = L * (d/r) * (k/m) = 2^32 * (b/c) * (d/r) * (k/m)
The 2^32 is so called Difficulty of 1, and is used to determine how profitable mining is. It has been assigned as a constant to
calculating the lavishness to balance out the really big number that usually is the complexity. Mining ratio above 1 means that
mining for vanity addresses is more profitable than mining for blocks (by the factor of MR), while a ratio below 1 means that
mining blocks is more profitable.
For our internal calculations, the ratio k/m has been set to 0.06. You can find out your precise ratio
here.
I have a comment/I made a piece software you might be interested in
Sweet! Contact me through the Bitcoin Forum, my username is ThePiachu.
You should also check out this page for more info.
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