Generate vanity address

If you're tired of the random addresses generated by regular Bitcoin clients, you can use a vanity address program to create a more personalized address. For example, you could create an address that starts '1Satoshi' and ask people to send Bitcoin to 1SatoshiHHqnDPRSfiZ5GXJ8Gk9dbjO.

Vanity address programs accept as input a pattern (e.g. 1Bitcoin) and create a public address and private key. The amount of time required to find a given pattern depends on how complex the pattern is, the speed of the computer, whether it is using CPU or GPU, and if you get lucky.

Difficulty of finding a vanity address

vanity difficulty Comment
1AAAAA 259,627,881
1QLbz6 259,627,881 This vanity is alphabetically located before a major pivot, the RIPEMD160 hash value of 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (address: 1QLbz7JHiBTspS962RLKV8GndWFwi5j6Qr).
1QLbz7JHiBTspS962RLKV8GndWE 2.9597E+45
1QLbz7 837,596,142 This vanity is partially after a pivot and thus the difficulty increases.
1QLbz7JHiBTspS962RLKV8GndWG 1.6489E+47 After a major pivot and 59 times as difficult as the 'E' vanity.
1QLbz8 837,596,142
1aaaaa 15,318,045,009 After various pivots and subsequently more difficult.
1zzzzz 15,318,045,009
1abcdef 888,446,610,539 Six characters case sensitive starting with a lower case character.
111111 1,099,511,627,776 A special case: leading number 1 (one) is especially difficult.
1abcdefg 51,529,903,411,245 Seven characters case sensitive starting with a lower case character.
1abcdefgh 2,988,734,397,852,220 Eight characters case sensitive starting with a lower case character.

Using a vanity address generator to try to attack addresses

You might think that you would be able to find the private key for a given address by running a vanity address generator. In practice, this is considered impossible. Given that the difficulty increases exponentially the longer your vanity is, so does the average time required to find that vanity. The table below shows how an increasingly complex vanity affects the difficulty and average time required to find a match only for that vanity, let alone the full address, for a machine capable of looking through one million keys per second.

vanity difficulty average time
1B 22 < 1s
1Bi 1,330 < 1s
1Bit 77,178 < 1s
1Bitc 4,476,342 (4.48E+6) < 10s
1Bitco 259,627,881 (2.6E+8) 3 minutes
1Bitcoi 15,058,417,127 (1.506E+10) 3 hours
1Bitcoin 8.7339E+11 1 week
1BitcoinE 5.0657E+13 1 year
1BitcoinEa 2.9381E+15 60 years
1BitcoinEat 1.7041E+17 3,500 years
1BitcoinEate 9.8837E+18 200,000 years
1BitcoinEater 5.7325E+20 11,700,000 years
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend 1.6209E+47 3.3E+33 or 3.3 decillion years.