Ninjastic
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Board Development & Technical Discussion
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Isn't the output of SHA256 *slightly* too big to use for a private key?
by
chriswilmer
on 09/10/2013, 19:02:01 UTC
If the order of the elliptic curve in Bitcoin is some number slightly less than 2^256, then why is it OK to use the SHA256 hash of some input as a private key? My (steadily growing) understanding of ECDSA is that the private key must be some integer between 1 and the order of the curve, which is :

Code:
n = FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFE BAAEDCE6 AF48A03B BFD25E8C D0364141

Sorry if this has been asked 1000 times already...