Hacker News Reader

For those wondering how to generate vanity Tor onion addresses in a more efficient manner (taking advantage of your GPU): https://github.com/lachesis/scallion

View on HN

Too bad you have to do it yourself, we can't have a service doing that in the cloud.

Finding an arbitrary 8 character onion with scallion is easy even on a video card from 2009 (ATI 5770). You don't need fancy hardware for this.

That said you could use an Amazon GPU instance for a handful of cents an hour and run scallion there.

Maybe doing that in the cloud would compromise the security of your vanity address. You would not own the private key. Your cloud provider could control your domain.

(Please correct me if I am wrong…)

Yeah, that's the reason.

Correct.

Vanity addresses are popular in bitcoin, but difficulty rises exponentially with each character. Most people don't want crunch random numbers for 6 months. The solution to 3rd party key generation is split keys.

Essentially the addition of keys to get the desired final key.

Generate key X, give X public address to cloud provider, they search for key Y so that X + Y == YourVanityAddress, when found they send you private Y. Private X + Y is your vanity private key.

Vanity address generated by 3rd party in a trustless environment.

I was not aware of that technique, thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com