Anyone who's knowledgeable in Elliptic Curve Cryptography? It's complex. \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Anyone who's knowledgeable in Elliptic Curve Cryptography? It's complex.

355 sats \ 14 comments \ @Fabs 13 May bitcoin_beginners

I'm working on a personal summary, and have been trying to wrap my head around the basics of ECC which is utilized during key derivation in HD-wallets.

I've got something, but man, it's complex.

If you're knowledgeable in that regard, feel free to leave a comment, and I'll @ ya once the summary is up! I'd really appreciate your input!

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32 sats \ 1 reply \ @ChrisS 14 May

The first three chapter of Jimmy songs Programming Bitcoin book is free on GitHub and a good intro to the subject. The basic idea is you can start with a secret 256 bit number and you can use a curve and perform some mathematical operations and get a public key that you can share with anybody(think address to receive funds). This is actually how the first Bitcoin transactions were done(Pay to public key). It’s theoretically impossible for anybody to gain any information about your private key with just the public key. With the private key you can then sign messages(Bitcoin transactions) that can be proved mathematically with very little computing power that only the person with knowledge of the private could have computed the signature.

HD wallets are used to compute a lot of the private public keys pairs(and addresses) to make backing up easier. Before HD wallets every time a new address was generated a new corresponding private key had to be backed up. With HD wallets all we have to do is store the seed (phrase) and a derivation path and we can restore all the private keys needed to recreate our wallet.

If you’re trying to understand ecc I would start with how it is used to generate a public key from a private key first then move on to how it is used in HD wallets.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs OP 14 May

I'm going to post the first part (mnemonic) possibly today, since the master seed is needed to derive the master xpriv-> master Xpub, which is where I'm currently at.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @BenAllenG 13 May

Going to shill saving satoshi here, chapter 4 goes through ECC and I think it is a great resource for going a little deeper into the cryptography going from private-key to public-key

12 sats \ 1 reply \ @Lumor 13 May

This site rocks: https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/keys/hd-wallets/ Also, Programming Bitcoin by Jimmy Song is great for ECC.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs OP 13 May

Absolutely! I've been using that very site for a few weeks now, and have even contacted Greg to ask if he'd be interested in reviewing the summary's contents before they're posted, which he gladly agreed to!

I'll have the improved version sent to him tomorrow morning. 🤠

You'll surely remember some of the diagrams I've used in the summary, they're his. 😆