I've seen some people with vanity Monero addresses like 43COINxxxxxx. Does having a vanity address like this increase its susceptibility to getting cracked and view/spend keys getting found?
1 Answer
In terms of cryptography: no, unless the vanity generator is badly implemented, without a proper source of entropy.
Although, if you use an untrusted vanity generator, they could record your private key and send it somewhere. Good old trick.
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2Actually, you can use your own source of entropy with a vanity generator, protecting against both their faulty rng, and them stealing your private key. Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 1:33
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1How it works is you generate a random $a$ value, and send the vanity service $A=a*G$. They search for a $b$ such that $A+b*G$ is a vanity address. They then send you b. The private key to $A+b*G$ is now $a+b$. There is no way that the service could of learned this value, since if they had a way, they could take anyone's address $A$ and figure out the $a$, which is impossible. Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 1:37
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1Good points, in the case you use a third-party. Locally, as I said make sure to use an executable you trust. This one is open source: github.com/ehmry/monero-vanity Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 1:48
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1what would be nice is if the local software let you use the above method with a cold storage wallet you generated Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 1:49