Having Fun With Bitcoins: Vanity Bitcoin Address Generation

This article will hopefully give a bit of background around bitcoins and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), and has a bit of fun with the creation of addresses which have special sequences.

Please note that you cannot reverse a Bitcoin public key into a private key (well, you could, but it would cost you trillions and trillion and trillions of dollars and more to do it).

There are demos here and here.

Having fun with bitcoins

While many see Bitcoin as a way to make (or lose) money. I see the beauty of the mechanism, and how well it has been crafted. To me, the beauty of the cryptography amazes me, and in the way that the Bitcoin network is still going strong. It was started with a genesis block, and the mechanism has purred along for over nine years. Okay, it’s consuming the energy of a small country, but it has, at least, managed to get an infrastructure up-and-running, and which has some worth. So let’s have a bit of fun with Bitcoins.

So did you know that, if you have the processing power, you could generate a Bitcoin address with a name in it? So, I could have:

1b1llbitcoinxVGKLyNGAobvpDfJYDbsh1