Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Can you create a Bitcoin address manually?
by
gmaxwell
on 12/01/2015, 00:48:18 UTC
5. Use the ECDSA point doubling formula and point addition formula on the generator point to get the public key. This will probably take a few days.
I think this is basically intractable manually if done naively. You're talking hundreds of millions of 32 bit operations. Even if you were able to retire one per second and worked 12 hours per day you're talking 6+ years.

Thats why I suggested a book of pre-generated G multiplies.  You'd also need to do the arithmetic with jacobian coordinates to avoid performing a modular inverse for every operation. Based on timings people gave for sha256 by hand, I think it could be gotten down to a week or so, though fiddling around with the numbers a bit I'm less sure.