Pairgen is a tool for generating pairs of "similar" Bitcoin addresses. For example, generate a pair of addresses that share the first 80 bits:
$ pairgen 80
...
WIF[1] = ...
WIF[2] = ...
shared = 20chars
hash160[1] = 53e1f4f491509f9012bd901be5147447f770018b
hash160[2] = 53e1f4f491509f9012bd825ce1e9599b253188ef
shared = 15chars
addr[1] = 18eXmgR5Svoqqa6PaYVrKvbH6hvrp5xe3A
addr[2] = 18eXmgR5Svoqqa6JXSMmbNaD4Cs5ThcV1P
Pairgen exploits the so-called birthday attack to find long (partial) collisions. Pairgen's algorithm is similar to other tools such as MD5CRK.
Pairgen is experimental software.
You must independently verify all generated addresses before use! Never send Bitcoins to a generated address before uploading (and verifying) the private keys using other wallet software.
The basic usage of pairgen is:
pairgen bits
where bits is the number of shared bits.
The advanced usage of pairgen is:
pairgen [--job=JOB] [--message=MESSAGE] bits [distinguished-bits]
The job option tells pairgen to store state in the files job.secret, job.public and job.work. Jobs can be stopped and restarted, which is useful for large runs.
The message option allows the user to specify the message used for signature generation.
The distinguished-bits determines how granular the work is.
- More work is good: more work = higher chance of finding a solution (unlike vanitygen).
- Reuse work: The job option can be used to find multiple solutions. Restart pairgen (with the same command-line arguments) to find the next solution. This will reuse work, so finding more solutions becomes easier over time.
- Split work: The job.public file can safely be distributed. You can generate work on multiple machines, and combine the work by concatenating the resulting job.work files.
For Linux make sure that gmp-dev is installed, then run make:
$ make
For Windows use MinGW cross-compilation. First Download and build gmp-6.0.0 from source, then run:
$ make -f Makefile.windows
The job.secret file is not encrypted in any way.
If a worker thread finds a loop with no distinguished point, it will loop forever. Currently pairgen just relies on this being unlikely.
The new pairgen code is GPLv3. Pairgen incorporates other code (e.g. libsecp256k1) distributed under other compatible open source licenses.