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I don't believe that there's any way to generate the vanity hashes without iterating. In base 58, there's $\log_2(58) \approx 5.858$ bits per letter, so fixing 8 letters would need in average $58^8/2 = 2^{\log_2(58)·8}/2 \approx 2^{46}$ iterations. Note that Bitcoin addresses always start with a 1 by convention (this comes from the version field), and ...

Initially there was MD4, then MD5; MD5 was designed later, but both were published as open standards simultaneously. MD5 had been designed because of suspected weaknesses in MD4 (which were very real !). So MD5 was the first (and, at that time, believed secure) efficient hash function with a public, readable specification. MD5 was immediately widely popular. ...