Nostr Web Client

What exactly are vanity keys? I am lost again

Vanity keys are Nostr npub keys that contain a word or phrase or something unique/special for the individual.

They are a fun way to add personality to your experience/profile but not mandatory.

You can “mine” vanity keys by running programs that target a word or phrase that you have set. The longer the phrase the more time it will take to mine. So an npub containing the word dog would be exponentially faster than one containing the words dogwalker.

That is my understanding and hopefully gets info across. Someone more technical could probably explain it better!

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Discussion

hit with a hint of s 2y ago

oh man, thanks so much!

hit with a hint of s 2y ago

I wonder:

say I would like to have a vanity address with crypt0 in it or something like bada55cafe in HEX

what are the chances that somebody else mines it as well and effectively have access to the same private key?

are "vanity" addresses more prone to get accidentally-hacked?

zach 2y ago

Good question! I am not sure on the chances of someone else mining a duplicate key. I imagine pretty slim even with “shorter” vanity words or phrases but I don’t know what the cutoff is as far as number of characters goes. I imagine for longer characters though and good key management you would be pretty safe.

Richard Carback 2y ago

There could be weaknesses introduced by the mining alg that make it predictable but, naively, it's the probability that the rest of the bits randomly selected are the same.

So, assuming your vanity is 6 bytes, thats 32-6 => 26 bytes or 208 bits of entropy if i'm remembering the pubkey size right, so chances are 1/2^208 => 2.4308653429×10⁻⁶³ to choose the same key that was mined, then doing that over and over until you find it. 208 bits is pretty safe. #[2]