A vanity crypto address is an oxymoron of a concept. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were built around decentralization and anonymity, yet programs, websites, and companies offer solutions to generate personalized addresses to make your crypto address unique. Are personalized addresses the way of the future? Are you crazy for using a boring, randomly generated address? How do you even begin the search for such an address?
Before we tackle these questions, let's get into the basics of crypto addresses.
What is a cryptocurrency address?
A cryptocurrency address is a public string of letters and numbers that can be shared freely and can be used to receive cryptocurrency in an exchange. One's address is also recorded when a payment is made in cryptocurrency. Addresses are formatted in a standard manner so they can be recognized as belonging to a specific currency and verified to be a valid address. To take Ethereum as an example, a wallet address may follow the format of:
0xBBE081b965050e13FA02f777c5956E02b6dD693EOr as a QR code:
To break the address into pieces:
0x– A standard identifier of a hexadecimal valueBBE081b965050e13FA02f777c5956E02b6dD693E– 40 hexadecimal characters (20 bytes) that relate to the address's public key
Because an Ethereum address follows the format of 0x followed by 40 characters from the set [0123456789ABCDEF], there are theoretically 16^40 possible Ethereum addresses from 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 through 0xffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff. This range equates to approximately 1.46 quindecillion (that's 1.46 * 10^48) or 1.46 trillion trillion trillion trillion addresses. That is enough for every human on Earth to have over 100 trillion trillion trillion unique Ethereum addresses. (Note: Ethereum addresses may technically have both capital and lowercase letters, but this is for address verification. An address can be converted to only either upper or lowercase letters and still be valid).
The specifics of how to generate an Ethereum address from a private key are beyond the scope of this post, though they may be covered more in depth in the future. To make a long story short, however, a public address is created from a private key with a length of 256 bits (32 bytes) in the following process:
- A random (or as close to random as possible) 32 byte private key is selected
- A cryptographic function is used to generate a public key from the private key
- A second cryptographic function is used to generate a string, the 40 right-most characters of which are used in the address
This process is one directional; that is, it is easy to take a private key and generate an address, but it is virtually impossible to take an address and generate a private key. This one-directionality provides the security needed to ensure no one can (realistically) steal the funds attributed to an Ethereum address.
Now that we've covered the basics, we can move on to why you actually clicked on this article.
What is a vanity cryptocurrency address?
A vanity cryptocurrency address is an address that has been specifically chosen as having some desirable property, usually because it begins with a certain permutation of characters. In this example, I have created an address beginning with BBE (because I'm Bloated Banana Eel, get it?) followed by 37 random characters. In my case, I used the website https://vanity-eth.tk/, but there are a multitude of options for both online and offline address generators for many of the major cryptocurrencies.
Because of the one-directional nature of cryptocurrency addresses, the process of determining the private key from a specific address is extremely difficult. This leads to the only real option being a simple, brute force attack, generating hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of private keys in the hopes that one of the generated keys will produce an address containing the desirable quality. Something as simple as an address with a prefix of BBE might only take a few seconds while something more difficult (read: longer) like 0123456789ABCDEF might take days or years of computational power.
Vanity address generators will provide both the address and the private key used to generate the address. For this example address, the address was created using the private key (as a final reminder, DO NOT USE this private key or public address as it would now be trivial to steal any coins contained in the wallet):
86798f13ddc030bad0b994e8b07424061ef493ba3cd786f96fe5255d1df0a190This key, however is only one of an uncountable number of keys that would produce a valid wallet with the prefix BBE. One could likely run the algorithm a million times and find a million different addresses beginning with BBE without ever receiving a duplicate address.
Why you shouldn't use a vanity address
Privacy is often included as one of the large drivers for the use of cryptocurrency. An address on its own has zero ties to the real world outside of the private key only known by the address's owner. This "pseudonymity," allows cryptocurrency to be used by individuals who prefer privacy in their transactions, similarly to the pseudonymity of cash payments but on a global scale.
Many recommend using an address only once or at most a few times to preserve the anonymity of the address owner. Should an address be used too often, a determined observer might be able to recognize patterns in spending and eventually trace down the address's owner. A vanity address would likely only exacerbate this issue: a vanity address owner would be less likely to abandon an address once used due to the time, effort, and computational power expended trying to find their desired address. Worse still, the address likely has some meaning to the user that would only leave further clues as to the address owner. For these reasons, should privacy or pseudonymity be of importance to a user, a vanity address is a poor choice of effort.
Given the disadvantages of a vanity address, one might expect few to want and spend the time creating vanity addresses.
Who would use a vanity address?
If you frequent the younger side of the Internet—especially the cryptocurrency-focused side of the Internet—webpage footers containing a tip line similar to the one below will be familiar.
These "tip addresses" are usually permanent additions to a website that provide an easy way for readers or users of the website to directly support the creator with tips or donations to pay for the development and continued support of a website, especially if the website was useful or informational. These addresses are likely not going to change every time a tip is donated, so the pseudonymity of such an address is effectively null and void. If the whole reason for using a random address—privacy—is not possible in such a situation, why not add a little flair to an otherwise nonsensical string of hexadecimal characters? In the example above, the author made the choice to include the words "AceBabe" at the beginning of their address to make the address unique and meaningful to him or her.
Vanity addresses are not unique to cryptocurrency. Facebook gained notoriety for its Tor-accessible .onion website: https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/, a backronym for Facebook's Core WWW Infrastructure. Facebook spent an unknown amount of computing resources (aka: money) on brute-force finding this vanity onion address. A 16-character vanity onion address is 1 of 32^16 possible addresses, and while Facebook could not have brute-forced this specific address, one can imagine their process was to find several .onion addresses beginning with "facebook" before finally settling on the final address. Such a process is largely unnecessary (see DuckDuckGo's well-published Tor-accessible address of https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/), but Facebook found the endeavor worthwhile enough to expend considerable computing power to generate their vanity address. Many other major publications that have developed .onion websites have gone through similar effort, including The New York Times and the CIA.
As a side note, the tip address in the image above is for the website https://vanity-eth.tk/; should you find value in the tool or this post, I'd suggest showing your appreciation, as the site was the original inspiration for this post.
Why you're probably going to go ahead and make a vanity address
It should be noted that I have absolutely no connections to any of the vanity address generators listed, and I cannot recommend any of them for security, privacy, or efficacy. Please be sure to do your research before choosing to use any address generator to ensure your hard-earned cryptocurrency stays safe.
Now while all the talk of privacy and anonymity with cryptocurrency has its merits, in the United States, Europe, and many other developed regions, cryptocurrency is increasingly highly regulated by their respective governments. Many cryptocurrency exchanges require ID verification before trading is allowed on their exchange. I, and I can imagine many others like me, do not plan to change my crypto address after every transaction because it would simply be too cumbersome to make the (in my opinion) marginal benefit worth the effort.
So if cryptocurrency is losing its anonymity, why not add some personalization and flair to the address? I have generated several Ethereum addresses using the https://vanity-eth.tk/ website, and I plan to generate personalized Bitcoin addresses in the future as well. Should you wish to create a vanity Bitcoin address, the possibilities are essentially limitless as the possible valid combinations of letters and words are basically endless. Ethereum is more restrictive, forcing you to use only 0-9 and A-F, but if you're looking to create an address with words, you could use websites such as YourDictionary or More Words to find potential address words.
So while you (don't) need a vanity cryptocurrency address, I haven't let that stop me, and you can reach me at my brand new Ethereum Bloated Banana Eel wallet address: 0xBBEbbe6A48D9CE97828127b6981A83DCB9a3762b.
I would like to sincerely thank you for taking the time to read my first article, and if you are in a particularly helpful mood, please leave your brutally honest criticisms and improvements below.
- BBE
