Vanity onion miner launched: custom prefixes without sending keys anywhere
Onion addresses are just the public key of a hidden service, rendered in base32. That has a fun consequence: generate enough keypairs and you can find one whose address starts with whatever prefix you like. Today we shipped a tool that does exactly that.
How it works
The vanity miner runs entirely in your browser. It generates keypairs as fast as your CPU allows, checks each candidate address against your chosen prefix, and discards the misses. When it hits, you get the keypair - and nothing has ever left your machine. The honest math
Each additional character multiplies the work by 32. Two or three characters take seconds. Four takes a coffee break. Five takes hours, six takes days, and seven is a hobby project with a deadline problem. Plan accordingly. One warning worth printing in bold: never use an online vanity service that generates the key for you. Whoever generates a keypair knows the private half - and whoever knows the private half owns your service. Ours never sees a single key, which you can verify with the network inspector. The onion validator will confirm any address you mine actually parses.