Prime spirals are real and are the basis of ECDSA key generation
In what way are prime spirals (Ulam Spirals) the basis of ECDSA key generation?
You are aware that ECDSA is based on the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem and not the difficulty of factoring the product of large primes, right?
I came across this website and i know it looks fishy as hell, but i need someone here to calm me down.
That website is a bunch of gobbledygook and hogwash. Don't waste your time on it.
If some random, unknown, un-vetted, self-proclaimed expert can create an internet webpage and you immediately become frightened by the nonsense that they can spew forth with no thought to reality, then you are in for a
LOT of paranoia in your life.
WTF .... is this why satoshi used secp256k1 instead of r1? is that something related?
Nope.
Most likely secp256r1 was avoided because its parameters have no reliable explanation about how they were chosen. They
*appear* to be random, and we are told that they were randomly chosen, but its entirely possible that an effort was made to find parameters that resulted in a weakness and then those parameters were announced to be random. Unless you were aware of what the weakness was, it would be impossible to prove that the parameters were chosen for any particular reason.
secp256k1 is far more rigid in the methods used to choose the parameters. See here:
http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/rigid.html