P2PKH adresses containing sentences
I would like to know more about sentences that can exist in P2PKH adresses and how to find them.
For instance in the case of the bitcoin puzzle 66 that was stolen by someone's bot [1], the stealer wrote a message by sending some dust to adresses like 1WhatWereUThinking6666666662wkqq1
He doesn't control these addresses, but still they exist.
Q1) how were they found? It seems he started from 1WhatWereUThinking666666666666666 and gradually changed the last few digits in an algorithm until hitting a valid address: is there really a function isValidBitcoinAdress which returns true/false somewhere?
Q2) in any case, how was he sure that it would be found quickly? I.e. couldn't it be the case that among all addresses the most similar is an incomplete target like 1WhatWereUThi123456666666662wkqq1?
References
[1] Bitcoin Puzzle 66: Is this unconfirmed transaction archived anywhere?
from Recent Questions - Bitcoin Stack Exchange https://ift.tt/8NF1hwf
via IFTTT