Thank you! You're probably going to end up saving me a lot of time!
-TT

Hi,

I've been trying to find some documentation on bitcoin ECDSA key formats, the exact specifications,
the reason for why the particular hash steps were chosen, the algorithm to verify whether keys are valid,
how the checksums work, etc...and have only been able to find little tidbits here and there but no nice
comprehensive document.

This article is pretty helpful: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address
I've managed to implement those exact steps and it works, even though I can see many developers who
haven't had a lot of experience working with crypto libraries tripping over certain details
(i.e., are the hashes on strings of hex digits? if so, is it case-sensitive? or are the hashes on binary numerical
formats? what about dealing with base64 encoding? should the base64 encoded string be hashed? or its
numerical value? etc...).

Not that this stuff is particularly difficult to grasp, but a concise description with rigorous steps
for generating/validating key pairs seems desperately needed.

Even worse, though, when looking up the private key specification, all I can find on the bitcoin wikis is
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key#Base_58_Wallet_Import_format

and
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_import_format

which say almost nothing...

And the documentation on the mini private key format is even more lacking...and quite frankly doesn't
make sense to me from a security standpoint...after all, the whole point of having a long private key
is that it makes it difficult for an attacker to guess by brute-force. Having mini private keys seems to
defeat the whole purpose of this...or am I just missing some brilliant insight?

Could someone please point me to an exact set of steps for generating wallet import format base 58
privkey? And also, I'd love to understand the validation algorithms/checksums/etc...

If nobody has yet put together a good document on all this, I volunteer to write one and to make it
available for the bitcoin community.

Thanks.
- TT

I posted a request in one of the whitelisting threads...but given that there are zillions of posts
in that thread, I thought I'd create a new topic in hopes that someone might take notice.

The link to my post in that thread is
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=15911.msg418175;topicseen#msg418175

If there is some further procedure required to be able to reply to posts regarding a site
I'm coauthoring, please let me know ASAP as it is deeply frustrating to not be able to answer users'
questions.

Thank you very much.

Please, let me out of here

I've made over 5 posts and have been logged in over 4 hours and you can go ahead and read my
posts which at the very least show I've spent more than a few seconds pondering bitcoin.

I'm a codeveloper of http://bitcoinduit.com and need to be able to reply to posts in our thread.

Thank you very much in advance.

Thanks, guys!

Yes, you're absolutely right, thanks.

Here are two of the posts I was referring to, which have gotten 0 replies:

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=31522.0
https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=29817.0

Hi,

I've posted several questions here in the newbies section that nobody seems to have answered.
I'm guessing either they've been thoroughly dealt with in the non-newbie sections and I just haven't
been able to find the right search terms...or else nobody sufficiently knowledgeable and competent
in these matters has bothered to wander into the newbie section to address them. So if someone could
kindly either point me to posts in other sections that cover these topics or tell me what I need to
do to be able to post somewhere where people who are experts in these matters might actually read them,
it would be much appreciated.

Thank you very much.

Hi,

Is there a way to specify a transaction fee from the JSON-RPC API? Right now, in the GUI,
if the transaction fee is too low, it prompts me if I want to pay a certain transaction fee
(usually .0005 or .001) before sending. From the API, though, it just automatically charges
the transaction fee without confirming. So I want to be able to do two things:

1) Specify from the API a transaction fee I am willing to pay.

and

2) If the transaction fee is too low, to have the API suggest a transaction fee
to me which I can then approve.

Thanks for the help.

I've noticed that if I've set transaction fees to 0.00 in my preferences and config file, when I try to send
bitcoin via the GUI, it sometimes prompts me if I want to pay a transaction fee of .0005 and sometimes
doesn't prompt me and sends with no transaction fee. I have the following questions:

1) Why does it only prompt me sometimes and on what does this depend?

2) I've noticed that when I make the call to sendfrom via the JSON-RPC API, I don't get prompted. It will just
assume I want to pay the .0005 transaction fee. Is there a way to get notified of this from the API before
committing to sending? Is it capped at .0005? Could it ever be higher than that? Is there a way to override
the GUI preferences and the config file settings and choose a specific transaction fee via the API and have
the call fail with an appropriate error message if the transaction fee is too low?

But when you sign a transaction, you do it from a specific private key which corresponds to a unique public key which is the address, no?
So to check whether a transaction is valid, the network checks the block chain to see if the transactions involving that address add up. Or am I missing something here?!?

But say I wanted to be able to specify all these things myself in the API without the client
trying to do all these clever little tricks for me. Say I wanted a simple way of saying
"I want X amount transfered from address A to address B." Shouldn't the API expose
this functionality?

It might not be that horrible a thing for those who only intend to use the wallet from the GUI
and you're not doing any really serious business that requires rigorous accounting nor doing
any programmatic access to to the wallet. For the basic consumer, I agree that just having
tabs in the wallet would probably be sufficient. For those of us who intend to use the bitcoin
API to do serious business, it's a nightmare.

I'm looking to write some server software that involves automated payments and keeping
track of potentially tens of thousands  or more addresses and accounts. Without
a feature that allows you to move specific addresses to another wallet, it becomes a
colossal mess having to go through all the unused addresses ALL the time. In terms
of performance, security, and code/DB management issues, it really is a veritable
nightmare.

It makes sense that you don't trash old addresses in that you completely throw away your
private keys. But it makes a lot of sense to be able to transfer unused accounts somewhere else,
where you can still check up on them periodically but they don't clutter your wallet.

Is there a way to remove unused accounts from the address book and wallet? My
wallet's starting to get quite cluttered.

I'm using v0.3.23-beta on OS X.

I created some new addresses. Most of them seem to have been created fine. But one of them
got listed twice in my address book. Each instance lets me give it a different account. When
I try calling listreceivedbyaddress, sure enough, it gets listed twice and each instance claims
to have its own balance.

Is there any way to fix this problem other than to trash the wallet and create a new one?

Please help...

OK, so this is my change. Only problem is, I don't see this address ANYWHERE in my address book.
Is it a "hidden" address? Is the client trying to do something clever without telling me?

Also, why can't you just get the change back at the sending address? So the client is creating a
hidden account in my wallet to receive the change?

OK, I'm guessing someone has already answered this one somewhere...and it could just be
that I still don't really understand the bitcoin protocol.

When I send, say, .3 BTC, I'm seeing a bunch of other transactions in the transaction history
with addresses I've never seen before. Rather than a straightforward .3005 input and .3 output,
with .0005 as a transaction fee, I see something like 2 BTC as an input and two outputs:
one is 1.6995 and the other is .3. I recognize the .3 output as the address I sent to. But I have
no idea who the other address is.

Can someone please help?!

Thanks.