Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Private keys in Bitcoin

Private keys are required to be kept safe and normally resides only on the owner's side. Private keys are used to digitally sign the transactions proving the 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 Format (WIF) in order to make them easier to copy and use. It is a way to represent the full size private key in a different format. WIF can be converted into a private key and vice versa. The steps are ...