Vanity Address

A vanity address is where a Bitcoin public address is in the form on a readable word, this means that you can make a custom Bitcoin address personalised with your own name, or to promote your business. A specific public address can't be generated directly, instead it's found by randomly picking private keys and checking the corresponding public address for the required word. This means that the longer the word (also if case sensitive), then the longer it takes to find, this is because every letter adds an exponential difficulty to the search. It's currently only feasible to search for vanity addresses with a short, 4 to 5 letter word at the start of the address if generating own a home computer. Bitcoin addresses must also start with the number 1.

There are many websites which provide searches for a vanity address. However, the only method which has been tested by us is one described by 99Bitcoins which uses a client-side address generator made by the user samr7 on Github.

Steps to generate vanity address with Windows.

1. Download the executable vanity address generator in a .zip file here.

2. Extract the .zip file.

3. Run command prompt (type cmd into start)

4. All you have to do is type the address of the file followed by the word you want to search (with a prefix 1), e.g

C:\Users\User\Downloads\vanitygen64.exe 1Perry

will search for a Bitcoin address starting with the case sensitive combination of characters 1Perry, which found the public and private key combination for the address 1PerryA2nHD6Udra9LBbLJB5bAjuPiQkCe

Note that the file path is set for my local machine and must be changed for a different user. You can select the path to vanitygen64.exe file by dragging the file into the cmd window (if you press enter here, it will show a list of options)