Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: There are more private keys than addresses ?
by
o_e_l_e_o
on 22/01/2021, 14:39:58 UTC
why every  bitcoin public address have 2^96 private key and  how can i find my  (2^96- 1) private key for my bitcoin public address?
since Elliptical curve private key and public key has 1:1 ratio, and that public key is encoded & hashed with some operation to get bitcoin public address.
There are 2256 private keys (actually just less than, but that is irrelevant to this discussion), 2256 public keys, and 2160 addresses.

As you say, private and public keys have a 1:1 ratio, but since to turn a public key in to an address you have to pass it through a RIPEMD-160 function, which only has 2160 possible outputs, then there cannot be 1 public key per address. There are 2256 inputs in to RIPEMD-160, but only 2160 outputs, meaning that each output has 296 inputs.

also is it possible to encrypt message with bitcoin public address and then decrypt with private key which is generated by ECC.
It is possible to encrypt a message with a bitcoin public key and decrypt it with the associated private key, but not with the address. You need to either extract their public key from a transaction they have made, or ask them to share it with you directly.