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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?

seek adventure
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1 Answers1

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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.

binaryFate
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    Actually, you can use your own source of entropy with a vanity generator, protecting against both their faulty rng, and them stealing your private key. – Christopher King Sep 23 '16 at 01:33
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    How it works is you generate a random $a$ value, and send the vanity service $A=aG$. They search for a $b$ such that $A+bG$ 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. – Christopher King Sep 23 '16 at 01:37
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    Good 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: https://github.com/ehmry/monero-vanity – binaryFate Sep 23 '16 at 01:48
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    what would be nice is if the local software let you use the above method with a cold storage wallet you generated – Christopher King Sep 23 '16 at 01:49