Vanity address is a normal Bitcoin address that starts with some letters/string of characters that suits to you. In another way, it's a customized bitcoin address that something from your name or screen name, code name, etc.
There are so many ways to create a personalized bitcoin address or Vanitygen from online generator whether free or you have to pay which is not recommendable because of the risk of losing bitcoin, in the fact that they hold the private keys of this vanity address. So you have to stay away with them. Like this report of scam accusation from bitcointalk.org.
The example below illustrates a session of vanitygen. Using my Intel Core(TM) i3-6100U CPU on x64 Windows.
But this time I will show you the other way of making vanitygen from oclvanitygen.exe. And By the way here's the discussion about vanitygen in Bitcointalk.org.
You can get the source from Github . Includes make files for Linux and Mac OS X.
Windows x86+x64 binaries here . PGP signature here.
Before doing things, you must know some rules or some forbidden characters that you should not do, as a common Bitcoin address. Bitcoin addresses consist of random digits and uppercase and lowercase letters, with the exception that the uppercase letter "O," uppercase letter "I," lowercase letter "l," and the number "0" are never used to prevent visual ambiguity. Well, of course, we can see also that uppercase letter "I" (/ai/) is also like a lowercase letter "l" (/el/) and also like number 1 (one) or uppercase "O" (/ow/) is also like zero "0". That's why there are exception of doing this. And you must also know that the longer the prefix of the bitcoin vanity address the more it will be difficult to find.
So here's the commands of oclvanitygen, I'm going to use.
This tutorial is different because it's using a split key, this can be used without risking your final private key being compromised, so this is much secure compared to making vanity address directly. We are going to make vanity address from two different private key. All we need is this site Bitaddress.org. And here's an example of commands of doing it.
And here's the example output. And you can import it in any bitcoin wallet like Electrum, blockchain.info. etc.
Vanity Bitcoin Address:
1stGF8GAyKnamsK8A24yEKGKB3MpWvDxK
The above is your new address that should include your required prefix.
Vanity Public Key (HEX):
04A03677D0CD513BD36CCFCCD8325382EF979471FDFC781A331FA21D559E345415CDBA3D5679C2C4BAAE1B2BC71C50A357FD53C563C2F9F43B58A2FC744CD03A43
The above is the Public Key in hexadecimal format.