What Is A Bitcoin Vanity Address?

Today, everyone knows and heard about Bitcoin and crypto-currency. You must have noted that to use Bitcoin as a form of currency; to store, send and receive it, one needs a sophisticated wallet. A wallet in which you would have your Bitcoin address, public keys, and private keys (which you require to confirm ownership of the wallet).

Just like one can decorate their post mailboxes to receive emails, can personalize their email addresses to a cool name, their gaming alias and so on, there’s also an opportunity for one to have their very own like-able and personalized Bitcoin address.

For legacy addressed, an example of such address may be “1BitcoinLove1234….”

That’s right, you can have your own and choose-able Bitcoin address.

How To Create A Bitcoin Vanity Address

Bitcoin vanity addresses can be created in a number of ways.

Let’s say;

• You can use some online generators that will do the work for you. It will take anywhere between 1 to 24 hours or even more to create your desired one, because it’s a kind of hit and trial method as there’s practically no way to create a public address first and then link a private key to it. You can use Google to search for the latest generators out there. Although there is negative speculation about them and for the right reasons. The site generators will email you the public and private keys and since a private key is being emailed, there remains a question on its security, always!

• You can use your own computer to do it. It’s not hard but surely will take a load on your computer so make sure it’s having good processors and computing power. Make sure to keep your desire a bit low since the more characters you desire, the harder it is going to be. The process is simple, go to Google and search for Vanitygen on Github and download the file. You will also be able to find a tutorial on how to use it. Basically, after downloading the ZIP file, you have to run it on cmd, and then with some commands on the tutorial, you have to run the program by quoting your desired characters. You should use the character “-i” which will make the process smoother by making the choice case-insensitive. Then again, you will find these in the tutorial.

• If you don’t have enough computational power, you can use some Vanity pools. The fee varies to your desired number of characters. You can do a quick Google search about Vanity pools to get redirected to the most trusted ones right now!

Those are basically the most used methods.

In conclusion, it is important to highlight that before creating a vanity address, one should know the pros and cons of creating one.

On the positive side, we have a cool, beautiful, and personalized Bitcoin address that will forever belong to us as long as we have the private keys. It’s nice, it’s attractive.

However, we should always remember that one of the most fundamental of Bitcoin’s causes was to have freedom as well as privacy for any user. Hence, attaching any personal information to personalize a Bitcoin address and using it for permanent use might lead to the same failure of privacy.