FAQ - Vanity Addresses

Vanity addresses are personalized Bitcoin addresses.
Since Bitcoin addresses are very cryptic, personalized addresses can be helpful to identify the recipient(s).

The personalized addresses are just as secure as regular addresses. In terms of privacy, they also behave like regular addresses. Because each*r can create a vanity address with 1Love... and transactions could be transmitted with Tor for privacy protection or a transaction mixer could be used so that the transaction cannot be tracked!

On the other hand, vanity addresses can create more security to identify the recipient exactly, because the longer the defined string is, the more expensive it is for the attacker to find a vanity address that is longer than the owner.

Example: The address 1Bitcoin21... contains 9 defined characters. It takes several years to find them with a normal computer. The address generator will need only a few days to find them, because of the dedicated hardware and the intelligent software.

As usually two or three more characters are remembered, which follow the prefix by chance, i.e. 1Bitcoin21tv5..., the attacker has to calculate these characters too. However, the difficulty and duration of the calculation increases by a factor of 58 with each additional character. In his lifetime the attacker will not be able to find an address with 11 or 12 characters, it would cost him millions in hardware and electricity!

With the help of vanity addresses it is even possible to write messages into the blockchain, where several vanity addresses in a row receive amounts from one address, this can be seen in the Blockchain Explorer!

Vanity addresses are personalized Bitcoin addresses.
Since Bitcoin addresses are very cryptic, personalized addresses can be helpful to identify the recipient(s).

The personalized addresses are just as secure as regular addresses. In terms of privacy, they also behave like regular addresses. Because each*r can create a vanity address with 1Love... and transactions could be transmitted with Tor for privacy protection or a transaction mixer could be used so that the transaction cannot be tracked!

On the other hand, vanity addresses can create more security to identify the recipient exactly, because the longer the defined string is, the more expensive it is for the attacker to find a vanity address that is longer than the owner.

Example: The address 1Bitcoin21... contains 9 defined characters. It takes several years to find them with a normal computer. The address generator will need only a few days to find them, because of the dedicated hardware and the intelligent software.

As usually two or three more characters are remembered, which follow the prefix by chance, i.e. 1Bitcoin21tv5..., the attacker has to calculate these characters too. However, the difficulty and duration of the calculation increases by a factor of 58 with each additional character. In his lifetime the attacker will not be able to find an address with 11 or 12 characters, it would cost him millions in hardware and electricity!

With the help of vanity addresses it is even possible to write messages into the blockchain, where several vanity addresses in a row receive amounts from one address, this can be seen in the Blockchain Explorer!

The price of the addresses is caused by the cost of the expensive hardware, which needs electricity and the previous investments in the sophisticated backend of the Vanity Address Generator.

Compared to other service providers the most efficient software and hardware is used with guaranteed 100% renewable energy. The Vanity Address Service of B-Uni is many times cheaper and more secure than the service of others.

Furthermore, further developments will be financed, such as an open source software project for a diy hardware wallet, which will support vanity addresses and key merging!

Further cryptocurrencies are to be added to the address generator, which these will be, the community will then decide!

Last but not least, the income will be donated to a good cause. It is to be donated automatically from the payments, to charitable organizations, which will be publicly visible for the customers* inside, thanks to the Blockchain!
This is planned for 2021/22!

The duration of the calculation depends on several factors. On the one hand, the character length is decisive, on the other hand, it is decisive whether upper and lower case is to be considered.

Basically it cannot be said exactly how long a calculation takes, because the calculation is subject to a random process!

Each additional character increases the difficulty and thus the duration to find a vanity address to the desired prefix by a factor of 58.

To find a vanity adress with 6 characters this generator needs some seconds to 25min. This will change as soon as the hardware is upgraded, then adresses up to 9 characters will be found in a few days.

If you don't use upper and lower case letters, you can find addresses with 10 characters within a few hours or a few days. 

You get the public key from your private key. The generator only accepts compressed public keys. Create a Compressed WIF Private key store it securely as you store any other private key, a wallet can derive the public key from the private key.

Exampel with Electrum Wallet:
Use an existing wallet or create a new wallet with a seed and strong password. Backup the seed and the wallet.dat!

Make shure your device is Offline!

Get the Private key:
Click on "View" -> "Show Addresses" -> Click on the Button "Addresses" at the header, choose one of the addresses and Label it e.g. "key for vanityaddr"
-> click with the right mouse button on this labeled address and choose "private key", by entering your password it shows the private key beginning with "L" or "K",
you can show it as QR-Code to import this private key into your favorite mobile wallet. You need this Private key later for the key merging.

Get the Public key:
Click with the right mouse button on this labeled address again and choose "Details", it shows the public key (WIF compressed). Copy the public key or scan it as QR-Code and paste it into a note!

Basically, any wallet can be used that has an import function for WIF-compressed (Wallet Import Format) keys.
Depending on your Wallet it shows only one Address type that might not be your vanity address.

Import the final private key into the Electrum Wallet:
Open Electrum, click on "Wallet" -> "Private Key" -> "Import"
To import a specific address type (from the final key) write this in front of the final key:
p2pkh:KxZcY47uGp9a... -> 1BTCgQM...
p2wpkh-p2sh:LxZcY47uGp9a... -> 3MiauXF...
p2wpkh:KxZcY47uGp9a... -> bc1qcryptqueen3fjfk..


For Android I recommend the Mycelium or Bluewallet app.

At the Mycelium wallet, go to the account overview and click on the upper right corner on the key symbol with the plus, on the next page you can import the final key from a QR-code or from the cache. 
Go to the account of the imported final private key, tap on the QR-code of the address to switch between the three formats P2SH, legacy & bech32.

Bluewallet shows the Legacy Address by default when importing the WIF key, but if there are funds on the p2sh or bech32 address it shows the corresponding address.
Open Bluewallet, tap on the plus in the right upper corner, tap on "import wallet", paste the final private key and press "import".