Correct me if I’m wrong, vanity npubs are riskier than random ones, correct?
In my head, if I were to mine a key pair to find npub1tatumnxymfyez0nlmmxf287nh9cujfuetxhk9vptwcdqg0pn8pxqxasw3d for example, someone could in theory target that easier than @TatumTurnUp.
Or am I far off base because of the remaining characters? Or hell, could the same argument be made for mining npubs that ARE random?
I think I may be answering my own question here with such a small portion of your vanity npub not being enough to guarantee finding that key pair.
Help? I’m fucking stupid?
Yeap youre in theory correct that it would be “easier” but really to find your exact npub nsec pair is whats so difficult with the remaining characters.
Okay that’s what I kinda shifted to the thought of as I wrote it out. It would technically be easier, but not easy.
Correct. It would be ~less~ "virtually impossible" but still "virtually impossible"
Target it for what? We know the whole string of the npub, vanity or not. Are you asking if it's easier for someone to attempt to find the nsec key because the npub has a couple random letters in alignment together in a desirable way? I dunno. We have a lot of atoms in the universe.
Yes that’s what I was thinking but couldn’t articulate it and ended up figuring it out based on me just realizing that was stupid after I posted. God I hate it here.
It's okay to ask questions brother.
Okay. If you say so…
Is any of this real?
Am I aware?
Are we human?
Are we dancer?
It’s a valid question for sure , made me stop and think about it
highly doubt it. look at my npub. I think the biggest risk is humans seeing a vanity prefix and assuming it’s legit.
Yep. Thought about the concept of address poisoning (scam mainly used on Ethereum I believe)
Had to think about this one. Everyone saying it would be easier is wrong. The first characters being human-appreciated will no different than them being random appearing when it comes time to guess the secret key behind it. Now.. if your secret key has human-appreciated structure to it, and even worse if you share what some of that structure is, that’s a different story.
right it's about the structure of the private key; if the vanity generator samples private keys at random until the associated public key starts with the prefix, it's nothing easier to find the key, if it would (say) naively enumerate all private keys from 0..N and choose the first whose pubkey starts with a certain prefix, it's trivial
If you can crack a bitcoin xpriv from the xpub then you probably wont bother with npubs. They require the same or similar computations
there's one sense that vanity npubs tend to be riskier: in many cases, people use external services to generate them, so the private key is exposed to more computers, or insecure software, increasing the chance of leaking it
Any thought on the split-key method? Would it make it more or less secure?
It's described here: https://github.com/JeanLucPons/VanitySearch
that's a fascinating construction ! to be honest i can't immediately say how fool-proof it is, but it won't make things less secure than when the generating party sees the full private key
It's equivalent to grinding through unhardened paths in an HD wallet whose xpub you know, then telling the wallet owner "wpkh(xpubBLAH/3568/4528/6426) has a nifty pubkey"
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