Author: Peter Todd 2014-01-20 11:08:47
Published on: 2014-01-20T11:08:47+00:00
On January 18, 2014, a discussion took place regarding the use of ECDH mechanism for Bitcoin wallet encryption. Alan Reiner inquired about the possibility of using a faster asymmetric scheme such as ed25519, but Jeremy Spilman argued that using another cryptosystem would require additional code and may not be worth it. Instead, he suggested using a 160-bit curve for d2/Q2 and e/P when payment is sent only to Q1, resulting in faster multiplication and smaller data size. However, this suggestion was contingent on whether it would weaken privacy and if the added complexity would be worthwhile.It was noted that Bitmessage uses the same ECDH mechanism as stealth addresses in Bitcoin, with decent performance. Actual performance numbers were being gathered by Kyle Drake, who was working on getting ECDH numbers on Javascript, the slowest possible implementation of the idea. It was also confirmed that send to stealth addresses using prefixes could be brute-forced with the proposed OP_RETURN mechanism in under a second, even with rather long 8-bit prefixes.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T23:39:16.816659+00:00