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I've been wondering if using vanitygen to create your own bitcoin address with a unique prefix, is safe from being compromise by others? I'm currently using a shared wallet address from a trusted website and I'm targeting now to create my own bitcoin address using vanitygen. Can someone enlighten me? Thank you!
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"Using vanitygen you might think that you would be able to find the private key for a given address. In practice, this is considered impossible. Given that the difficulty increases exponentially the longer your vanity is, so does the average time required to find that vanity. The example table below shows how an increasingly complex vanity affects the difficulty and average time required to find a match only for that vanity, let alone the full address, for a machine capable of looking through 1 million keys per second."
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Vanitygen#Use_of_vanitygen_to_try_to_attack_addresses
vanity difficulty average time
1B 22 < 1s
1Bi 1,330 < 1s
1Bit 77,178 < 1s
1Bitc 4,476,342 (4.48E+6) < 10s
1Bitco 259,627,881 (2.6E+8) 3 minutes
1Bitcoi 15,058,417,127 (1.506E+10) 3 hours
1Bitcoin 8.7339E+11 1 week
1BitcoinE 5.0657E+13 1 year
1BitcoinEa 2.9381E+15 60 years
1BitcoinEat 1.7041E+17 3,500 years
1BitcoinEate 9.8837E+18 200,000 years
1BitcoinEater 5.7325E+20 11,700,000 years
1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSend 1.6209E+47 3.3E+33 or 3.3 decillion years
On the other hand: key reuse is bad for anonymity for yourself and others as well as reduces your security. Depending on how you generate the vanity address, you're also adding steps that can fail to the process of creating a private key and therefore possibly increase the chances of a MITM or other hacker gaining access to your key. All in all definitely less safe. – Jannes – 2016-06-09T11:25:03.360