Statistical analysis of Bitcoin public key distribution - page 2.

amaclin

legendary

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Quote

Ah, brilliant! Thanks for the information. So, technically, someone would be only able to analyze personally generated addresses or addresses that have sent coins. That's really neat to know.

Yes. And this is a reason (one of) not to re-use addresses.

UPD: there is no such thing as "personally generated addresses"
Address is either in blockchain or not exists Grin

SoldierKid

newbie

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Quote from: amaclin on September 24, 2014, 01:58:25 AM

Quote from: SoldierKid on September 24, 2014, 01:48:25 AM

My question -- how are you to obtain the public key of an address?

Yes, it is not possible by default.
But if the address has spendings (any number of outgoing transactions) the public key is in blockchain.

For example. Let us take the address 1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T
Then take one of spendings from this address
https://blockchain.info/tx/c678a097402531ae2ecaec13bb5777338268af0a8fad3d399bd0ae2e64f2ad15
scroll down...
Do you see the long line "0478d430274f8c5ec1321338151e9f2..."
This is public key.

Most of addresses have spendings. So, we can obtain millions of used public keys

Ah, brilliant! Thanks for the information. So, technically, someone would be only able to analyze personally generated addresses or addresses that have sent coins. That's really neat to know.

amaclin

legendary

Activity: 1260

Merit: 1019

Quote from: SoldierKid on September 24, 2014, 01:48:25 AM

My question -- how are you to obtain the public key of an address?

Yes, it is not possible by default.
But if the address has spendings (any number of outgoing transactions) the public key is in blockchain.

For example. Let us take the address 1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T
Then take one of spendings from this address
https://blockchain.info/tx/c678a097402531ae2ecaec13bb5777338268af0a8fad3d399bd0ae2e64f2ad15
scroll down...
Do you see the long line "0478d430274f8c5ec1321338151e9f2..."
This is the public key for address 1JwSSubhmg6iPtRjtyqhUYYH7bZg3Lfy1T

Most of addresses have spendings. So, we can obtain millions of used public keys
This will be more that enough for statistical analysis

SoldierKid

newbie

Activity: 14

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My question -- how are you to obtain the public key of an address? Addresses aren't public keys, but the hashed/formatted version of public keys.

The only way to obtain public keys would be message signing afaik.

Of course, that's with the information I found here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses

amaclin

legendary

Activity: 1260

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Quote

Even farther from the private key distribution: has anyone ever done an analysis of the statistical distribution of the Bitcoin addresses?

What kind of statistics are you interested in?
Are you interested in the statistics of all possible addresses (2¹⁶⁰)?
Or used in blockchain [~50 mln]? Or with non-zero balance [10 mln]?

There are a lot of vanity addresses and artificially created addresses (created not from privatekey->publickey->adderss sequence) in blockchain. I do not see any reason to calculate anything thom this garbage. But if you pay for it...

BurtW

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All paid signature campaigns should be banned.

I understand that the statistical distribution of public key values (points) tells us next to nothing about the statistical distribution of private keys however I am still curious as to whether a statistical analysis of the public key values has ever been done.

Even farther from the private key distribution: has anyone ever done an analysis of the statistical distribution of the Bitcoin addresses?

Remember remember the 5th of November

legendary

Activity: 1862

Merit: 1011

Reverse engineer from time to time

Every single day people have bots running that identify transactions that are weird and spendable by anyone or weak brainwallets or re-used K value.

amaclin

legendary

Activity: 1260

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Statistics of public keys can not be converted into the statistics of private keys

🏰 TradeFortress 🏰

vip

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👻

Has anyone performed statistical analysis of the Bitcoin public keys on the blockchain? It might be useful for identifying if there may be a client with flawed key generation out in the wild.

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