Bitcoin Vanity Address Service Vante.me in the Hot Seat
Bitcoin vanity services have always had a certain appeal, as it allows users to generate a customer address to send and receive funds from. Vante.me is a new vanity address service, and they hope to stand out from similar offerings.
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Vante.me: Bitcoin Vanity Addresses
In the world of Bitcoin and digital currency, there are various vanity address generation services available. However, there is always a trust issue, as trusting a third party with generating a Bitcoin address and the private key is not as secure as people would like it to be. Bitcoin.com recently sat down with the Vante.me team to discuss their platform, and how they ensure the user is in full control of their funds.
Bitcoin.com (BC): What made you come up with the idea for a new Bitcoin vanity service? Was there is a demand for this, or is it just an “experiment” to see what kind of response you will be getting?
Vante.me: The idea came of my own experience. Around two years ago, I wanted to create a vanity address starting with my name. I got all the vanitygen software installed, but after running it, this would take around six years to generate. Obviously, I wasn’t going to wait this long. Online there were already some services available, but none of them provided a secure solution. You would have no certainty who else could have your private key. A lot of other people involved with Bitcoin seemed to have the same problem. This lead us to starting this service. With Vante.me we hope to provide a convenient and secure solution by allowing everybody to order a vanity address for a fair price.
BC: How do you feel or hope to see the service evolve in the next few months and years?
Vante.me: Hopefully, our service becomes more widely known as a trustworthy service and we’re able to provide more and more people with cool vanity addresses. At the moment we only support vanity addresses starting with a certain pattern, but there are a lot of other possibilities which can be explored. For instance: patterns anywhere in the address, regular expressions (for geeky developer types). There is plenty of room for improvements and enhancements and we hope the user response will motivate us to implement many interesting features.
BC: There are inherent trust concerns when people use a vanity generation service. What kind of countermeasures have you guys put in place to make sure people can rest assured they are in full control of the private keys?
Vante.me: We are using a way to generate these addresses which guarantees 100% you have full control of the private keys and thus full control of your bitcoin balance. To get more technical, we exclusively use splitkey address generation. The security of this method is guaranteed by the properties of Elliptic Curve Cryptography. When generating a vanity address at vante.me the user is always required to generate his own keypair. This can be done in the browser or by any other offline tool, next he/she will provide us with the public key. When we have calculated the solution, the user’s private key has to be combined with our solution, otherwise the address is useless. This means that the security of the vanity address is equal to the generation of any other Bitcoin address.
BC: Will you expand the offering for vanity addresses to other popular cryptocurrencies in the future, such as Ethereum for example?
Vante.me: Our platform certainly allows supporting other cryptocurrencies. At the moment, we are still investigating the possibility, but much will depend on the vanity address support of these crypto communities. As this support matures we will certainly consider it!
BC: Are there plans in motion to generate multi-signature vanity addresses at some point in the future?
Vante.me: There are no immediate plans for this, but it would absolutely be a nice feature to have.
BC: Is there anything else you would like to tell the audience?
Vante.me: For the readers who don’t know what a vanity address can be used for, here are some ideas:
Cold storage wallet: 1PensionXyuSSoY m6rH7XFZc6Hcy98zRZz
Donation address: 1thankyouA uSSoYm6rH7XFZc6Hcy98zRZz
Company address: 1TESLAAuX yuSSoYm6rH7XFZc6Hcy98zRZz
(contact us for bulk address generation if you want a unique address for every sale)
And due to our ample computing power we can usually deliver your address within 24h, and probably much quicker!
We would like to thank Robbert and Mike of Vante.me for taking the time to answer our questions and tell the Bitcoin.com community about their Bitcoin vanity address generation service.
What are your thoughts on the Vante.me service? Would you use a third-party service to generate a Bitcoin vanity address? Let us know in the comments below!
Website: http://vante.me
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Vante.me, bitcointalk.org
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