54 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
54 lines
2.5 KiB
Plaintext
I'd like to present a standalone command line vanity address generator
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called vanitygen.
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There are plenty of quality tools to do this right now already. So why
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use vanitygen? The main reason is that it is fast, more than an order
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of magnitude faster than the official bitcoin client with the vanity
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address patch applied. This is despite the fact that it runs on the
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CPU and does not use OpenCL or CUDA. Vanitygen is also a bit more
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user-friendly in that it provides feedback on its rate of progress and
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how many keys it has checked.
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Vanitygen is written in C, and is provided in source code form and
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pre-built Win32 binaries. At present, vanitygen can be built on Linux,
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and requires the openssl and pcre libraries.
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Vanitygen can generate regular bitcoin addresses, namecoin addresses,
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and testnet addresses.
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Vanitygen can search for exact prefixes or regular expression matches.
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When searching for exact prefixes, vanitygen will ensure that the
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prefix is possible, will provide a difficulty estimate, and will run
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about 30% faster. Exact prefixes are case-sensitive by default, but
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may be searched case-insensitively using the "-i" option. Regular
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expression patterns follow the Perl-compatible regular expression
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language.
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Vanitygen can accept a list of patterns to search for, either on the
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command line, or from a file or stdin using the "-f" option. File
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sources should have one pattern per line. When searching for N exact
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prefixes, performance of O(logN) can be expected, and extremely long
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lists of prefixes will have little effect on search rate. Searching
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for N regular expressions will have varied performance depending on the
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complexity of the expressions, but O(N) performance can be expected.
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By default, vanitygen will spawn one worker thread for each CPU in your
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system. If you wish to limit the number of worker threads created by
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vanitygen, use the "-t" option.
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The example below completed quicker than average, and took about 45 sec
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to finish, using both cores of my aging Core 2 Duo E6600:
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$ ./vanitygen 1Love
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Difficulty: 4476342
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[48165 K/s][total 2080000][Prob 37.2%][50% in 21.2s]
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Pattern: 1Love
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Address: 1LoveRg5t2NCDLUZh6Q8ixv74M5YGVxXaN
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Privkey: 5JLUmjZiirgziDmWmNprPsNx8DYwfecUNk1FQXmDPaoKB36fX1o
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Currently, it is difficult to import the private key into bitcoin.
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Sipa's showwallet branch has a new command called "importprivkey" that
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accepts the base-58 encoded private key. Vanitygen has been tested to
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work with that version of bitcoin.
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