Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: how many possible private keys can be generated for a public key ?????
by
pebwindkraft
on 15/10/2017, 10:03:24 UTC
...
Key pair encryption is based on an obscure relationship between larger prime numbers and their products.

first prime number    982450151
second prime number 982451581

product

982450151 * 982451581 = 965209704103638731

The private is key is made up of 982450151 and 982451581
The public key is 965209704103638731
...
How does this play with bitcoin priv keys?
I understand these principles, and the underlying math. Also read about ECDSA and points on the curve. This is what probably happens with open or libressl?
 $ openssl ecparam -genkey -name secp256k1 -rand /dev/urandom -out $PRIVATE_KEY

However: I read, that bitcoin priv keys are a random string of hex chars (2^64 Bytes), that can be generated by rolling dice. And eventually  converted to a hex representation (see e.g. here: http://www.swansontec.com/bitcoin-dice.html).

I think I am looking to match these two different approaches to the priv key. How do they "match"?
In your example what would the private key look like? The pub key is clear, would the priv key have some additional random chars (seed)?