Gosh, I should really up my level in cryptography. ECC allows for such amazing things, but my knowledge is still stuck at RSA, which I learned like 20 years ago in uni.
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Once you get some intuition for how curve point operations work in relation to scalars, it's very friendly to work with compared to RSA! The big advantage is everything is much faster so it's easy to play around with simple libraries to get a grip on the basics. I'm actually dreading have to relearn everything when post-quantum crypto becomes the norm.
If you wanna try out some code to see the inner workings of ECC, one of the best is actually the BIP340 (schnorr signatures) reference implementation. Although it's neither secure nor performant, and shouldn't be used in production, the reference code there is the simplest possible correct secp256k1 implementation i've ever seen. Most of it is captured in just two functions.
i also have some more higher-level ECC reading sources here for the next time you feel curious =)
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I just got done reading on Schnorr signatures in Mastering Bitcoin 3rd ed before opening SN 😀
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