Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Development & Technical Discussion => Topic started by: BitcoinQTlol on March 16, 2014, 03:00:11 PM



Title: are public keys case sensitive?
Post by: BitcoinQTlol on March 16, 2014, 03:00:11 PM
Are private keys case sensitive?

if i was writing down my priv key would i need to make it case sensitive


Title: Re: are public keys case sensitive?
Post by: cr1776 on March 16, 2014, 03:04:49 PM
This will probably answer the questions, but in general, yes:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_address
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Base58Check_encoding

:-)

(Obviously since they are numbers you can print a key in binary, decimal, hex or other format and it would not be case sensitive, so it depends a lot on the encoding and how it is displayed, but for the default format the above covers it.)


Title: Re: are public keys case sensitive?
Post by: grau on March 16, 2014, 04:55:06 PM
Are private keys case sensitive?

if i was writing down my priv key would i need to make it case sensitive

The private key is a large number. It is up to you how you encode it. The usual WIF or BIP32 encodings are case sensitive.


Title: Re: are public keys case sensitive?
Post by: ns12123 on March 16, 2014, 06:25:42 PM
It's case sensitive but if you mistyped you will not be able to send it. They will come back


Title: Re: are public keys case sensitive?
Post by: tkbx on March 17, 2014, 02:38:12 PM
Base58 private keys (example: 5Kb8kLf9zgWQnogidDA76MzPL6TsZZY36hWXMssSzNydYXYB9KF) are case sensitive, since the different cases represent different bytes (A is 01000001, a is 01100001).

Hexadecimal private keys (example: 9873D79C6D87DC0FB6A5778633389F4453213303DA61F20BD67FC233AA33262) are not case sensitive (9873D79C... and 9873d79c... are the same exact key, since the letters are actually numbers 10 - 15)