Satoshi and Hal Finney's wallet: what key generation process?

[Disruptivas]

Recently, we have seen some “problematic” issues involving the generation of keys for some services.

A few months ago, we discovered a vulnerability linked to BitcoinJS, a library used by various software to generate wallets. Among the most famous names among those possibly affected are Blockchain.info (currently Blockchain.com), BitAddress, Bitgo, GreenAddress and CoinKite.

Today I read some reports from users with problems related to Electrum on Tails.

So, I was curious to know what methods were used by Satoshi, Hal Finney and the first participants? Can anyone share links about?

[1714633240]

1714633240

[Husires]

Recently, we have seen some “problematic” issues involving the generation of keys for some services.

A few months ago, we discovered a vulnerability linked to BitcoinJS, a library used by various software to generate wallets. Among the most famous names among those possibly affected are Blockchain.info (currently Blockchain.com), BitAddress, Bitgo, GreenAddress and CoinKite.

Today I read some reports from users with problems related to Electrum on Tails.

So, I was curious to know what methods were used by Satoshi, Hal Finney and the first participants? Can anyone share links about?

Bitcoin v0.1 (Jan 8 14:27:40 EST 2009) was the wallet used by Satoshi and Hal Finney when tweeted “Running bitcoin,” (January 11) while Bitcoin 0.2 released was on December 16.

Bitcoin v0.1 was windows only for now.  Open source C++ code

https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/014994.html

Download link: http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar However, this wallet will not sync with current nodes due to Bitcoin hardfork.

Believe it or not, in the first versions it was possible to send to an IP address.

There are two ways to send money.  If the recipient is online, you
can enter their IP address and it will connect, get a new public
key and send the transaction with comments.  If the recipient is
not online, it is possible to send to their Bitcoin address, which
is a hash of their public key that they give you.  They'll receive
the transaction the next time they connect and get the block it's
in. 

[pooya87]

Today I read some reports from users with problems related to Electrum on Tails.

What was this "key generation related" problem?

So, I was curious to know what methods were used by Satoshi, Hal Finney and the first participants? Can anyone share links about?

Nobody knows because we weren't with them when they created their keys. We can only guess that they used the only existing client (v0.1) to generate it. Although there were lots of tools to generate a 256 bit random elliptic curve key back then too.

[apogio]

So, I was curious to know what methods were used by Satoshi, Hal Finney and the first participants? Can anyone share links about?

I am sure Satoshi and Hal knew ways to generate valid bitcoin key-pairs without using Bitcoin's software. They were both skilled professionals in cryptography. You can definetely generate the key-pairs without ever touching any bitcoin related software.

I doubt they have done it though, because Bitcoin core is Satoshi's invention and it uses these techniques specifically.

Today I read some reports from users with problems related to Electrum on Tails.

Tails is just an OS that does this:

Tails always starts from the same clean state and everything you do disappears automatically when you shut down Tails

Electrum is a just a piece of software, developed in 2011. Electrum uses (as far as I know) os.urandom() to generate entropy and combines it with some other input sources (user inputs, time etc.). You can even see the main dev talking about it back in 2013 here on this forum: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=167276.msg1746905#msg1746905

My questions to you are:
1. how can Electrum face issues specifically on Tails OS?
2. where did you read these reports? You know how people behave usually, writting whatever they want. Don't trust everything you read.

However, if indeed you have spotted a problem regarding Electrum, let us know and we can inform the devs on github. It's fully open-source!

[MusaMohamed]

Believe it or not, in the first versions it was possible to send to an IP address.

Post your static IP to test donation sending is used by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Send by IP address exists till version 0.3.13.
Version 0.3.13, please upgrade

- Only accept transactions sent by IP address if -allowreceivebyip is specified.

[ABCbits]

So, I was curious to know what methods were used by Satoshi, Hal Finney and the first participants? Can anyone share links about?

Nobody knows because we weren't with them when they created their keys. We can only guess that they used the only existing client (v0.1) to generate it. Although there were lots of tools to generate a 256 bit random elliptic curve key back then too.

In addition, they can generate 256-bit of data manually using certain RNG source.

Today I read some reports from users with problems related to Electrum on Tails.

I didn't find anything on either Electrum's GitHub[1] or Tails's GitLab[2].

Post your static IP to test donation sending is used by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Send by IP address exists till version 0.3.13.
Version 0.3.13, please upgrade

- Only accept transactions sent by IP address if -allowreceivebyip is specified.

I fail to see correlation between your post and OP's question. That feature contact that IP address and expect Bitcoin address as response, before the software can create Bitcoin transaction.

[1] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues
[2] https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/