How to configure bitcoin
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Bitcoin payment addresses are around 30 character strings of cryptographic gobbledygook. However, if you expend a little processing power, and you could get a slightly less meaningless string that humans might appreciate a bit more than a purely random address.
Functionally, a readable Bitcoin address, or vanity address , makes no difference what so ever.. The above vanity address, like any other Bitcoin address, is a base encoded representation of a cryptographic keypair.
The main difference is that I wasted 13 hours of processing power and electricity to generate a fancy address with two recognizable words instead of the normal random address. That first attempt unfortunately also contained a derogatory term for the female genitalia. The odds of the C-word appearing in any Bitcoin address along are astronomical, and it should have been even less likely to happen in an address with a reduced length for random characters.
Needles to say, I had to restart and let the hashing run for 19 hours which yielded about six thousand other candidates. I felt quite lucky to get that one by random chance. The barcode was found on a postal vote for the Australian national marriage equality vote.
Run it your address through a dictionary prior to publishing it anywhere, and run it through a human or two for an address that will be widely circulated such as an address for a donation pledge. A vanity Bitcoin address can be a cute design detail. Users are likely to copy-and-paste a Bitcoin wallet into their wallet software to perform the actual transaction. Most wallet software will warn the user about an invalid address.
You can help people identify such issues themselves by having a recognizable word or pattern at the end of the address rather than at the front. This increases the chance that people will spot that the address they pasted into their software is different from the address they meant to copy. If that pattern is missing or gone when they paste it into their wallet software, they might notice the mistake right away when they expected to see the same pattern they saw seconds earlier.
Any pattern that draws attention to the end of the wallet address can be a beneficial. Bitcoin Core and its derivatives support this feature, but not all other wallets have support for importing private keys. To do the actual cryptographic work required for the address generation, I used a software project called vanitygen.
The project page has all the information you need to get it going. There are online services that can do this for you for a small fee, but you really should perform address generation yourself to ensure you remain in control of the private key that unlocks your fancy new vanity address. You can now import the private key into your Bitcoin wallet software. The import process adds the private key required to confirm your ability to decrypt and spend funds sent to the vanity address to your wallet.
You may want to print your private key for backup purposes, but be sure to store it securely — whether physically or digitally. Anyone who gets hold of your private key also has access to all funds stored on the public vanity address.
Using the Bitcoin Core software, you can open the debug console from the Help menu: The first command can take several minutes to complete. If you enjoyed this article, or simply have too much Bitcoin burning in your digital wallet — please feel free to send some to the address included at the top of the article to support my writing.