It a previous series of posts, we figured out how to derive a Bitcoin public address from a private key. What should we do with this new knowledge? Let’s generate a bunch of addresses! Specifically, we’ll create a “vanity” address generator.
In previous posts, we figured out how to compute a Bitcoin address from a private key and we tested our code with an example from the Bitcoin wiki. In this post we try to convert a private key from a real wallet (MultiBit) to its corresponding address.
In previous posts, we looked at computing a Bitcoin public key from a private key, and computing a Bitcoin address from a public key. However, these posts dealt with keys and addresses in hexadecimal (hex) form, which is not the representation familiar to most Bitcoin users. Bitcoin addresses more commonly are encoded as Base58Check strings, which we explore in this post.
In a previous post, we derived a Bitcoin public key from a private key. This post explores how to convert that public key into a (hexadecimal) Bitcoin address. I’ll be using the Racket language to help me.