Foundations of Blockchain

Public and private keys

Public and private keys are generated using asymmetric cryptography. Private keys are kept secret in the users' wallets, whereas public keys are made public in the form of a Bitcoin address. Bitcoin uses elliptic curve cryptography to generate the public/private key pair. The private key is selected at random, and elliptic curve multiplication is performed to generate the public key. Elliptic curve multiplication is a one-way cryptographic function that makes it impossible to derive the private key from the exposed public key. You can explore the mathematical explanation and analysis of elliptical curve cryptography in Chapter 2, A Bit of Cryptography.

Bitcoin's private key is a randomly selected 256-bit character ...