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Mastering Blockchain.. - Third Edition

You're reading from  Mastering Blockchain.. - Third Edition

Product type Book
Published in Aug 2020
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781839213199
Pages 816 pages
Edition 3rd Edition
Languages
Author (1):
Imran Bashir Imran Bashir
Profile icon Imran Bashir

Table of Contents (24) Chapters

Preface 1. Blockchain 101 2. Decentralization 3. Symmetric Cryptography 4. Public Key Cryptography 5. Consensus Algorithms 6. Introducing Bitcoin 7. The Bitcoin Network and Payments 8. Bitcoin Clients and APIs 9. Alternative Coins 10. Smart Contracts 11. Ethereum 101 12. Further Ethereum 13. Ethereum Development Environment 14. Development Tools and Frameworks 15. Introducing Web3 16. Serenity 17. Hyperledger 18. Tokenization 19. Blockchain – Outside of Currencies 20. Enterprise Blockchain 21. Scalability and Other Challenges 22. Current Landscape and What's Next 23. Index

Cryptographic keys

On the Bitcoin network, possession of Bitcoins and the transfer of value via transactions are reliant upon private keys, public keys, and addresses. Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is used to generate public and private key pairs in the Bitcoin network. We have already covered these concepts in Chapter 4, Public Key Cryptography, and here we will see how private and public keys are used in the Bitcoin network.

Private keys in Bitcoin

Private keys are required to be kept safe and normally reside only on the owner's side. Private keys are used to digitally sign the transactions, proving ownership of the bitcoins.

Private keys are fundamentally 256-bit numbers randomly chosen in the range specified by the SECP256K1 ECDSA curve recommendation. Any randomly chosen 256-bit number from 0x1 to 0xFFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFE BAAE DCE6 AF48 A03B BFD2 5E8C D036 4140 is a valid private key.

Private keys are usually encoded using Wallet Import...

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