Generating addresses starting with certain characters such as “JoeAnonymousUserB7pMqyVa8JRcpZdCQLQ”

Question

Similar to how the SHA256 hash competition exists to validate a transaction, I wonder if this concept can be ported to addresses, so that the first few characters is significant to a human reader.

• Is there value in making a public key address start with human readable text?

• What approaches exist to accomplish this? Must the key pair be re-generated continuously or there there space to place a nonce?

• Could this cause legal issues? ...such as a key that contains text matching censored information which is replicated to countries that ban that information

Answer 1

Yes, the concept is known, and called "vanity address". The problem with it is that it takes a lot of computing power. However, there is also a "split-key" method of generating vanity addresses, which lets you commission other people for the computing work. And finally, I created a website called Vanity Pool that handles a sort of free market of vanity miners and buyers.

As for the legal issues, I have already included a so called "illegal number" in the block chain as a part of my master thesis. So far Bitcoin hasn't been banned;).