Litecoin Core Wallet Did Not Generate Public Key Rating: 6,3/10 2567 votes

2. Understanding Wallets

For litecoin core you back it up with a.dat file. File-back up. Then it'll create an extra.dat file. You can do a dump privkey in console of litecoin core if you really want you rpriv keys. For personal security. But you can use the same address and it'll go to your wallet. Hardware wallets, you use seedkeys. For discussion about Litecoin, the leading cryptocurrency derived from Bitcoin. Litecoin is developed with a focus on speed, efficiency, and wider. How do I export a private key from Litecoin core? For an IOS wallet Thanks 😎. Was launched with the fundamental goal to create a lighter version.

Apr 03, 2018  How to Import and Export Bitcoin Private Keys How to Import and Export Bitcoin Private Keys This guide was originally written with Bitcoin (BTC) in mind. The same steps apply for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) wallets. Just make sure you are dealing with the keys for the correct currencys wallet(s) before proceeding. Before getti. Aug 01, 2017  Before 0.14, the used keypool key was never marked as change-address key and directly returned to the keypool (leading to address reuse). Before 0.14, calling getnewaddress directly after fundrawtransaction did generate the same address as the change-output address. How do I export a private key from Litecoin core? Save hide report. Litecoin wallet. The best part about Litecoin is that the coin was launched with the fundamental goal to create a lighter version of Bitcoin. Lee wanted a. Dec 04, 2017  In this tutorial we are going to get our private keys from the bitcoin core wallet. This only works when you created the bitcoin address in the same wallet. Because only when you create a new.

When I first got into cryptocurrency, I lost a few hundred dollars worth of coins because I didnt understand what wallets or addresses were. I do not want this to happen to you, so lets take a moment to understand what Litecoin wallets are. If a wallet is where you keep your cash, then a Litecoin (LTC) wallet is where you keep and manage your Litecoins. To better understand this, I want you to think of your Litecoin wallet like you would your email account. With an email account, you can do various things with it like receive and send emails. A Litecoin(LTC) wallet is similar in that you can receive and send Litecoins through it as well. Your Litecoin wallet does 5 things specifically: It creates public keys derived from the private keys. It generates addresses from these public keys. It sends LTC by approving transactions. This happens by verifying transactions with a special signature created from your private key. It shares, or broadcasts, this information with the LTC blockchain network. If a Litecoin wallet is like a gmail account, then the LTC address is like an email address. Just like how you send you emails to other peoples email addresses, you send LTC to their LTC address. There are currently 2 types of Litecoin Addresses: These are segwit addresses which allow you to send LTC with lower fees. Some exchanges havent supported M-addresses yet. Therefore if you cant send to an M-address from an exchange, simply choose a legacy address. One more thing to note is that Litecoin and Bitcoin used to share the same 3-addresses for segwit. This caused confusion so LTC switched to M-addresses. Do not sent Litecoins to addresses that start with a 3. Above is a screen shot under the Send tab of an Electrum-LTC wallet. The Pay to section is where you enter the correct LTCContinue reading >>

The Top 8 Best Litecoin Wallets For Easy Access & Security

The Top 8 Best Litecoin Wallets For Easy Access & Security By: Sudhir Khatwani In: Cryptocurrency Last Updated: Litecoin is the worlds first altcoin, and like Bitcoin , it is also an open-sourced P2P digital currency. But unlike the turbulent surges in other crypto-coins, Litecoin has remained consistently in the list of top 5 currencies by market cap. And it has also proved to be a relatively safe bet in comparison its peers. <br /> Can't load widget<br /> Fun fact:Litecoin has grown more than 2000% in the last 6 months. Thats why Litecoin has become more precious in recent days. Many investors are now looking for ways to securely store Litecoins. So we thought of coming up with a list of reliable and safe Litecoin wallets. At CoinSutra , we believe that a secure crypto wallet should fulfill these critera: Should allow you to control your private keys. Should be compatible across different operating systems and devices. Should provide abackup and restore feature. Should have an active development community. So without further delay, here is the list of different hardware, software, and desktop Litecoin wallets. The Ledger Nano S is the most popular hardware wallet available, and it supports Litecoin. If you have a lot of Litecoins, this is the most secure and robust way to store them. It not only allows you to control your private keys, they are controlled in an offline environment. It comes with an inbuilt OLED screen, a backup seed key, and a pin code feature. This is how you can restore your funds in case something goes wrong with your hardware device. Harsh has recorded a few detailed video guides on how to use the Ledger Nano S. I recommend you watch them and subscribe to our YouTube channel . And if you are a multi-currency lover, theContinue reading >>

3. How To Protect Your Litecoinwallet

In the last post, we talked about the Pros and Cons of each type of wallet. This article will go into detail about the different ways to secure them. But first, lets talk about the different ways someone could steal your Litecoins because we can better prepare ourselves against attack if we know where its coming from. The Different Ways to Steal Your Litecoins Keylogging- This is when you inadvertently download a software via email or website that allows a hacker to record everything you type. They steal your passwords this way. Remote Access Control- This is when you inadvertently download a software via email or website that allows the hacker remote access to your computer. This allows them to look at your emails and automatically send LTC if they gain access to your wallet. Social Engineering- They get you to give away important info or passwords via e-mail, fake websites, or phone calls and use that information to access your accounts. Brute Force- They make educated guesses based on your personal life that theyve researched and begin throwing randomly generated passwords until they gain access to your account. They steal the private key to your address. If they do this, they can easily import or sweep your address into a wallet client and take your litecoins. If you havent noticed by now, all the points of attack come from being connected to the internet. This is why it is so important to turn our hot wallets into cold wallets. Hot Wallet: These wallets are connected to the internet. Cold Wallet: These wallets are not connected to the internet. Between the two, the safest wallet is the cold wallet because it isnt connected to the internet. This prevents hackers from gaining access to it. You can also add another layer of protection through encryption by locking yoContinue reading >>

Litecoin Core Desktop

In this guide, we will show you how to setup Litecoin Core Desktop Wallet. Litecoin supports the following platforms: Windows, MAC OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, and Blackberry. Lets begin by heading totheir official website Click the one that matches your operating system. If you have a 32-bit version of Windows, make sure you download that wallet. If you have a 64-bit version of Windows make sure you download that one. Once its downloaded, install it and run it. If windows firewall asks for permission,click > Allow access as its very important for the Litecoin connections. You will notice that the wallet will not function until its fully synchronized. Please wait a bit, it might take a while until its fully finished. After syncing,we need to Encrypt our wallet. To do that click > Settings then choose Encrypt wallet. Make sure you type a very strong password that will include, numbers, symbols, characters, uppercase and make sure its a very long password. Another notification window will pop up informing us that if we lose our passphrase we will lose all of our Litecoins. Please make sure you keep your passphrase somewhere safe. Another notification window will pop up. Once you have read it, Click > OK. Litecoin wallet will automatically shut down. Make sure you open it again. To backupthe wallet, click on File > Backup Wallet Make sure you save the file somewhere SAFE, I would recommend saving it on a USB. Each time you update your balance, dont forget to backup your wallet! Pay to: type the address of the person that you want to send coins to. Label: optional, but you can name it, to keep things organized. For example, if you want to send coins to your father, you will add label Father and it will be automatically saved in your address book as Father, and every time heContinue reading >>

How To Backup & Restore Litecoin Wallet On Pc

How To Backup & Restore Litecoin Wallet On PC If you are running a Litecoin QT wallet on your computer, its highly recommended to backup litecoin wallet on monthly basis. Backup can come handy in case of hardware failure or corrupt hard-drive. Backing up wallet is very simple, all you need is to copy wallet.dat file to somewhere else.Your wallet.dat file contains your private key(s) as well the addresses that hold money (if any), if empty then its not much of a use. Note : first of all, make sure that your wallet is encrypted ( instructions here ). Step 1. Open your Litecoin wallet, make sure the client must have the blockchain fully synchronized. Step 2. If your wallet.dat file is not encrypted anyone can easily steal all of your coins. We strongly recommend you to encrypt your Litecoin wallet as instructed above. Step 3. Now close your client and locate your Litecoin wallet.dat Locating Wallet.dat / Blockchain in Windows : C:Documents and SettingsYourUserNameApplication dataLitecoin C:UsersYourUserNameAppdataRoamingLitecoin Locating Wallet.dat / Blockchain in Mac OS : Locating Wallet.dat / Blockchain in Linux : Step 4. Copy / Save your wallet.dat on external hard disk or wherever you want. Its recommended to store your wallet on multiple locations. You can also add another layer of security by including another encryption layer to wallet.dat file using encryption tools like TrueCrypt .You can also use WinRar and set a strong password. Restoring a wallet backup is totally opposite of backing up, just copy the wallet.dat file from your thumb drive to the same location mentioned in Step 3. Just follow these steps: Copy your backed-up wallet.dat into your Litecoin data directory. Relaunch QT wallet, itll automaticallyrescan the block chain and should leave you wContinue reading >>

The Complete Guide To Selecting Your Litecoin Wallet

Last updated on September 10th, 2017 at 10:36 pm Your Litecoin wallet will be perhaps the most important tool you have for securing and protecting your Litecoins and other digital currencies, so make sure you take some time to familiarize yourself with them! Like Bitcoins, Litecoins can be stored in a digital wallet. This wallet will track the total value of your Litecoins and allow you to conduct various transactions. It might be easier to think of your ewallet as a sort of email system, except instead of sending and receiving messages, you can send and receive Litecoins and money. You can also track your history of exchanges and monitor your financial transactions. Webwallets You store your Litecoins on someone elses sever. Desktop / mobile wallets You store your Litecoins on your device (e.g. your laptop). Each type of wallet has its pros and cons. Webwallets are risker since someone can hack the companies servers and steal your coins, but on the other hand you can use them from anywhere in the world. Offline wallets are considered safer since someone will need physical access to your computer to steal them, but you will also be able to send Litecoins only from that specific device. Some wallets are completely free, while other wallets charge fees for various transactions. Make sure you read any fine print when choosing a wallet and pay close attention to any fees, as they can add up very quickly. There are several Litecoin wallets currently available, so we will go over some of the most popular options. Unlike Bitcoin there arent many options for Litecoin wallets, so I tried choosing the top 3 for you to cosider. Hardware wallets These wallets are a small piece of hardware that connects to your computer via a USB portal. They allow you to send and receive BitcoinsContinue reading >>

Recovering Litecoin Wallet From 2014

In early 2014 I bought lightcoins and as the price did not grow I forgot about them. Now I found the wallet file (litecoin.dat), but I can not remember what wallet I used at the time. In early 2014 I bought lightcoins and as the price did not grow I forgot about them. Now I found the wallet file (litecoin.dat), but I can not remember what wallet I used at the time. There aren't that many litecoin desktop wallet's (AFAIK, i don't hold many LTC's). Since it has a .dat extention, my first instinct would be to re-try litecoin core.. Maybe you could post the last couple dozen lines of your debug.log, or just move the debug.log, try to open the client using the litcoin.dat as wallet file (so a new debug.log gets generated), close the client again, then upload the full debug.log, so we can have a look at what's happening. Another usefull tool is db_dump, this tool allows you to dump berkeley db files, altough encryption might mess up the end result.. Just in case you're running linux, it might also be good to try the command 'file litecoin.dat'. At least it will tell us what kind of file we're dealing with. Guy you are so lucky, may i know how many litecoins have you bought before? I will suggest you to download the whole blockchain on your computer (far as i know, it is a big archive, more than 100gb) And then import your wallet.dat to your litecoin core But far as i know, there was a command that you could put in the console of litecoin core, and it was going to give you the private key of your wallet.dat. I dont remember, but look for it on the internet. And if you get the private key, you can import it to electrum or in litecoin core too.Continue reading >>

How Can I Recover Funds From A Bitcoin Core Wallet.dat File Without Having The Entire Blockchain Downloaded?

install a new wallet of choice, we recommend BitPay wallet, Electrum, or even Blockchain.info open a blank text file (in Notepad or TextEdit), we will be using this as a scratch pad cut and paste a RECEIVING address from your new wallet. It is essential that this address be a receiving address from your NEW wallet This is what a receiving address from BitPays Copay looks like: open Bitcoin Core (it is ok if it is not sync'ed) find the address that had funds sent to it, you might only have a few addresses under the 'Receive' section of Bitcoin Core. Those addresses might show up as 'Recent payments history'. You want to double click on each entry, then click 'copy address'. This is what the Receive section of Bitcoin Core looks like: Visit this web address: Paste each address into Insight to see if there are any unspent transactions to it. Unspent transactions is money that was sent to you that you haven't re-spent to someone else. Note, that the '(U)' means 'Unspent' and '(S)' means 'Spent'. A spent output has another bitcoin transaction that came later that used that output as an input. The following screenshot will show you what an unspent transaction output looks like: if you found an address from your receiving window that has unspent funds, then proceed. copy and paste the transaction id of the transaction that has your unspent funds into your scratch file. Also note which output in the transaction has your funds and the amount of bitcoin in the scratch file (see the screenshot above) now, we need to get a piece of data from the internet about your last transaction. Go here: click the button that says 'load url' and put in: where txid is your transaction id This is what codebeautify.org looks like after youve pasted in the url for insight.bitpay.com: The reContinue reading >>

Lost Ltc - Old Wallet, Same Laptop

I appreciate this may of been asked before but I need some help/advice regarding the recovery of 25 LTC from an old Litecoin-QT wallet. Back in December 2013, I had the Litecoin-QT application on my MacBook Pro with 25 LTC in the wallet. Years later, once realising LTC had increased in value, I noticed the Litecoin-QT application had vanished from my MacBook (I have used the same MacBook all this time). I cannot remember, nor had any need to delete the application due to having coins in the wallet. I then tried to download the application again hoping to recover my previous LTC balance. I understand it is not as simple as this, but I am just wondering if it is possible to ever recover these lost coins? I dont remember ever backing the wallet up, but the laptop is the same. Did you let the blockchain finish syncing? If you did not then let it finish and you r coins should be there also you need to make sure that you have the latest version installed which is version 0.14.2 on litecoin.org But only if the Application Data Folder containing the wallet.dat file was not deletedthis is separate form uninstalling and installing the application itselfyou can delete litecoin and then re-download it and your coins will still be there as long as you are using the same wallet.dat filewhich is also what is saved when you back up your wallet If you have a backup you would place it in this folder replacing the wallet.dat file that is blank with your backup and then rename it wallet.dat if no backup make sure there is only one copy of the wallet.dat file go to your application data folder locate4d here: ~/Library/Application Support/Litecoin/ and makesure there is only one copy of the file named wallet.dat if there are twodo not delete themcopy and paste one to the desktop and reopenContinue reading >>

Please Help With Litecoin Passphrase Issue

Please Help with Litecoin passphrase issue Ive never used litecoin qt wallet, but if you have the wallet file why would you need to enter the private key? Wouldnt you just open the wallet and enter your password? Wow thanks @bitvadol . Just saw all this now ( its morning here in Australia). Thanks so much for the time and effort looking into this for me. Very much appreciated. Hope this works if it does Ill be sure to send you hose 5 ltc as a thanks. WOW! Thank goodness for the Bitcoin pub and the awesome community. A very special thank you to John and Peter for making this platform available to the cryptonation. Big love to all! Its not the private key. Litecoin qt uses passphrase for the encryption of the private key in the .dat file. Every time you transact (sending coins), you have to enter the passphrase. In case of @Nige12 , he has that .dat file, but does not seem to get his passphrase right. Something ether is wrong with the .dat file, or his passphrase. Support here has been amazing thanks everyone. Thanks to @peter for putting this together. Losing my coins certainly is devastating but the support has been amazing and really refreshing. Ok Here are another batch of public updates on the situation. After a numerous failed attempts to recover his own wallet, @Nige12 decided to put the trust in me and send all the info to me. Unfortunately, his wallet.dat file has been corrupted and did not open in the LTC QT on my machine. Recommended to check the md5 sum of the file and wether it was similar to mine. Trying to recover the file while downloading the full blockchain. Update 1. Currently running the pywallet --recovery feature with the known passphrase. We shall see Update 2. No luck yet. Trying to run recovery again with possible variations of the known passphraContinue reading >>

How To Recover Your Corrupt Or Deleted Bitcoin Core Wallet

How to recover your corrupt or deleted Bitcoin Core wallet This post discusses the methods for recovering a deleted or corrupt Bitcoin Core Wallet. Many other currencies, such as Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Dogecoins and more share Bitcoin Cores wallet format and can be recovered using the same techniques and tools. I assume that you have the wallet password, or there is no password. (Ill post later on what to do if you forget your password.) This information is based on helping dozens of people in similar situations with my Bitcoin wallet recovery service . The information below is just an outline. I hope to add detailed instructions soon. Your wallet could have been deleted in several ways: If you removed the Bitcoin Core software, your wallet is still on your computer. Just go to your Bitcoin Core Data Directory : If you deleted the wallet file, you should first check for any backups you made. If you dont have any backups, you can try two things: Until the file is overwritten by new data, deleted files stay on your hard drive. You can get them back with data recovery software: Android smartphones: Turn onUSB Debugging and connect to PC. Now run Smartphone-enabled data recovery software . iPhone: I do not believe deleted application data (unlike photos, messages, etc) can currently be recovered. Previous versions are copies of files and folders that Windows automatically saves as part of a restore point. Previous versions are sometimes referred to asshadow copies. Follow Microsofts instructions to see if there is an older copy of your wallet. If you did a quick format, all your data are probably still on the hard drive. Use the tools above. If you did a full format on Windows or Mac, your hard drive sectors have been completely zeroed out, and your data is lost. If you wContinue reading >>

Litecoin Core Wallet

Hello all. I am fairly new to crypto investing. I recently downloaded the Daedalus and Litecoin Core wallets. I encrypted both and just realized that I have only one Seed Phrase set written down for the Daedalus wallet but not for the Litecoin Core wallet. It was late at night and I honestly dont recall writing down my recovery phrase for the Litecoin Core wallet, let alone being prompted to do so. Does anyone here know if the Litecoin Coin wallet actually generates a recovery phrase? I primarily store most of my LTC on the Ledger Nano S but thought to keep just a few in the Litecoin Core wallet. Thanks in advance! If im not mistaken, litecoin core uses QT, and depending on how you set it up, it might have never even asked. Not every wallet generates a custom seed random phrase. It is a special feature of SOME wallets that may or may not support litecoin. Jaxx for example does generate a seed, and does have litecoin compatibility. The trezor and ledger hardware wallets also have a seed recovery i pretty sure. Sometimes when you setup a core wallet, itll simply ask you how/if youd like to encrypt your wallet, and will take a simple password, which, if you wanted to, could be a seed. A seed is very convenient for a multi-wallet (jaxx, exodus, etc) that stores several currencies, that way you can have one solid safe phrase that can generate lots of different wallets. Makes it easier to restore.Continue reading >>

Litecoin Core V0.15.1release

Follow the Google+ page or Twitter for the latest dev news. We are pleased to release Litecoin Core 0.15.1 release. This is a new minor version release, including new features, various bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated translations. It is recommended for all users to upgrade to this version. A number of changes to the way Litecoin Core deals with peer connections and invalid blocks have been made, as a safety precaution against blockchain forks and misbehaving peers. Unrequested blocks with less work than the minimum-chain-work are now no longer processed even if they have more work than the tip (a potential issue during IBD where the tip may have low-work). This prevents peers wasting the resources of a node. Peers which provide a chain with less work than the minimum-chain-work during IBD will now be disconnected. For a given outbound peer, we now check whether their best known block has at least as much work as our tip. If it doesnt, and if we still havent heard about a block with sufficient work after a 20 minute timeout, then we send a single getheaders message, and wait 2 more minutes. If after two minutes their best known block has insufficient work, we disconnect that peer. We protect 4 of our outbound peers from being disconnected by this logic to prevent excessive network topology changes as a result of this algorithm, while still ensuring that we have a reasonable number of nodes not known to be on bogus chains. Outbound (non-manual) peers that serve us block headers that are already known to be invalid (other than compact block announcements, because BIP 152 explicitly permits nodes to relay compact blocks before fully validating them) will now be disconnected. If the chain tip has not been advanced for over 7.5 minutes, we now assuContinue reading >>

Bitcoin Password Recovery Tool By Thegrideon Software

Bitcoin and related cryptocurrency Wallets password protection is based on SHA-512 and AES-256 algorithms with thousands of iterations, thus recovery speed is limited, but we did our best to enhance this tool performance (recovery speed) with some advanced methods and it found to be the fastest password recovery tool for Bitcoin Wallets. Bitcoin Password allows you to setup a very precise search range to exploit known password details (parts and patterns) and to cut the required time of a search comparing to traditional attacks. Just check mixed attacks for example. Wallet encryption parameters are selected based on computer power available during the encryption process, thus recovery speed (complexity) is variable from Wallet to Wallet. The following tables are based on a Wallet with 75000 SHA-512 iterations. Approximate hashing rate is also provided, so the speed for wallets with a different iteration count can be calculated. The final password recovery speed is equal to CPUspeed + GPU(1)speed + .. + GPU(N)speed. For example: Intel i3 + integrated HD 4400 GPU + AMD R9 270 = 185 + 70 + 2 910 = ~3 160 p/s.Continue reading >>

Top 9 Best Litecoin Wallets For Security And Easy Access

Top 9 Best Litecoin Wallets for Security and Easy Access Felix Kster December 13, 2017 10734 no comments Litecoin is the worlds first altcoin which was created in 2011 by Charlie Lee , and like Bitcoin , it is also an open-sourced P2P digital currency. But unlike the turbulent surges in other crypto-coins, Litecoin has remained consistently in the list of top 5 cryptocurrencies in the world by market cap, and it has also proved to be a relatively safe bet in comparison its peers. Fun fact:In the last six months, Litecoin has grown more than 2000%, and is still increasing steadily. Litecoin is a decentralized currency used globally and permits the users all over the world to make payments in an instant and immediate manner. It is operated on the technology of block chains and does not have any centralized authorities. Litecoin has an enhanced efficiency and provides security. It offers complete financial control to the users and allows quick transactions. These are the reasons why Litecoin has become more precious in recent days. Many investors are now looking for ways to securely store their Litecoins, so we thought of coming up with a list of reliable and safe Litecoin wallets. Your Litecoin wallet will be perhaps the most important tool you have for securing and protecting your Litecoins. Thats why its very important to make sure you take some time to familiarize yourself with them! A Litecoin wallet is a software program or an application that allows you to send, receive store your Litecoins (LTC) safely. There are different types of wallets available on the market. Some wallets focus on security while some are easy to use but compromise security. Some wallets allow you to check your transaction history instantly. On the other hand, some wallets need to be connectedContinue reading >>

Not

In cryptocurrencies, a private key allows a user to gain access to their wallet. The person who holds the private key fully controls the coins in that wallet. For this reason, you should keep it secret. And if you really want to generate the key yourself, it makes sense to generate it in a secure way.

Here, I will provide an introduction to private keys and show you how you can generate your own key using various cryptographic functions. I will provide a description of the algorithm and the code in Python.

Do I need to generate a private key?

Most of the time you don’t. For example, if you use a web wallet like Coinbase or Blockchain.info, they create and manage the private key for you. It’s the same for exchanges.

Mobile and desktop wallets usually also generate a private key for you, although they might have the option to create a wallet from your own private key.

So why generate it anyway? Here are the reasons that I have:

  • You want to make sure that no one knows the key
  • You just want to learn more about cryptography and random number generation (RNG)

What exactly is a private key?

Formally, a private key for Bitcoin (and many other cryptocurrencies) is a series of 32 bytes. Now, there are many ways to record these bytes. Openssl generate ecc key with password. It can be a string of 256 ones and zeros (32 * 8 = 256) or 100 dice rolls. It can be a binary string, Base64 string, a WIF key, mnemonic phrase, or finally, a hex string. For our purposes, we will use a 64 character long hex string.

Why exactly 32 bytes? Great question! You see, to create a public key from a private one, Bitcoin uses the ECDSA, or Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. More specifically, it uses one particular curve called secp256k1.

Now, this curve has an order of 256 bits, takes 256 bits as input, and outputs 256-bit integers. And 256 bits is exactly 32 bytes. So, to put it another way, we need 32 bytes of data to feed to this curve algorithm.

There is an additional requirement for the private key. Because we use ECDSA, the key should be positive and should be less than the order of the curve. The order of secp256k1 is FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364141, which is pretty big: almost any 32-byte number will be smaller than it.

Naive method

So, how do we generate a 32-byte integer? The first thing that comes to mind is to just use an RNG library in your language of choice. Python even provides a cute way of generating just enough bits:

Looks good, but actually, it’s not. You see, normal RNG libraries are not intended for cryptography, as they are not very secure. They generate numbers based on a seed, and by default, the seed is the current time. That way, if you know approximately when I generated the bits above, all you need to do is brute-force a few variants.

When you generate a private key, you want to be extremely secure. Remember, if anyone learns the private key, they can easily steal all the coins from the corresponding wallet, and you have no chance of ever getting them back.

So let’s try to do it more securely.

Cryptographically strong RNG

Along with a standard RNG method, programming languages usually provide a RNG specifically designed for cryptographic operations. This method is usually much more secure, because it draws entropy straight from the operating system. The result of such RNG is much harder to reproduce. You can’t do it by knowing the time of generation or having the seed, because there is no seed. Well, at least the user doesn’t enter a seed — rather, it’s created by the program.

In Python, cryptographically strong RNG is implemented in the secrets module. Let’s modify the code above to make the private key generation secure!

That is amazing. I bet you wouldn’t be able to reproduce this, even with access to my PC. But can we go deeper?

Specialized sites

There are sites that generate random numbers for you. We will consider just two here. One is random.org, a well-known general purpose random number generator. Another one is bitaddress.org, which is designed specifically for Bitcoin private key generation.

Can random.org help us generate a key? Definitely, as they have service for generating random bytes. But two problems arise here. Random.org claims to be a truly random generator, but can you trust it? Can you be sure that it is indeed random? Can you be sure that the owner doesn’t record all generation results, especially ones that look like private keys? The answer is up to you. Oh, and you can’t run it locally, which is an additional problem. This method is not 100% secure.

Litecoin Core Wallet Did Not Generate Public Key West

Now, bitaddress.org is a whole different story. It’s open source, so you can see what’s under its hood. It’s client-side, so you can download it and run it locally, even without an Internet connection.

Litecoin Core Wallet Did Not Generate Public Key In Linux

So how does it work? Generate rsa key ssh cisco. It uses you — yes, you — as a source of entropy. It asks you to move your mouse or press random keys. You do it long enough to make it infeasible to reproduce the results.

Are you interested to see how bitaddress.org works? For educational purposes, we will look at its code and try to reproduce it in Python.

Quick note: bitaddress.org gives you the private key in a compressed WIF format, which is close to the WIF format that we discussed before. For our purposes, we will make the algorithm return a hex string so that we can use it later for a public key generation.

Bitaddress: the specifics

Bitaddress creates the entropy in two forms: by mouse movement and by key pressure. We’ll talk about both, but we’ll focus on the key presses, as it’s hard to implement mouse tracking in the Python lib. We’ll expect the end user to type buttons until we have enough entropy, and then we’ll generate a key.

Bitaddress does three things. It initializes byte array, trying to get as much entropy as possible from your computer, it fills the array with the user input, and then it generates a private key.

Bitaddress uses the 256-byte array to store entropy. This array is rewritten in cycles, so when the array is filled for the first time, the pointer goes to zero, and the process of filling starts again.

The program initiates an array with 256 bytes from window.crypto. Then, it writes a timestamp to get an additional 4 bytes of entropy. Finally, it gets such data as the size of the screen, your time zone, information about browser plugins, your locale, and more. That gives it another 6 bytes.

After the initialization, the program continually waits for user input to rewrite initial bytes. When the user moves the cursor, the program writes the position of the cursor. When the user presses buttons, the program writes the char code of the button pressed.

Finally, bitaddress uses accumulated entropy to generate a private key. It needs to generate 32 bytes. For this task, bitaddress uses an RNG algorithm called ARC4. The program initializes ARC4 with the current time and collected entropy, then gets bytes one by one 32 times.

This is all an oversimplification of how the program works, but I hope that you get the idea. You can check out the algorithm in full detail on Github.

Doing it yourself

For our purposes, we’ll build a simpler version of bitaddress. First, we won’t collect data about the user’s machine and location. Second, we will input entropy only via text, as it’s quite challenging to continually receive mouse position with a Python script (check PyAutoGUI if you want to do that).

That brings us to the formal specification of our generator library. First, it will initialize a byte array with cryptographic RNG, then it will fill the timestamp, and finally it will fill the user-created string. After the seed pool is filled, the library will let the developer create a key. Actually, they will be able to create as many private keys as they want, all secured by the collected entropy.

Initializing the pool

Here we put some bytes from cryptographic RNG and a timestamp. __seed_int and __seed_byte are two helper methods that insert the entropy into our pool array. Notice that we use secrets.

Seeding with input

Here we first put a timestamp and then the input string, character by character.

Litecoin Core Wallet Did Not Generate Public Key From Pem

Generating the private key

Litecoin Core Wallet Did Not Generate Public Key From Private Key

This part might look hard, but it’s actually very simple.

First, we need to generate 32-byte number using our pool. Unfortunately, we can’t just create our own random object and use it only for the key generation. Instead, there is a shared object that is used by any code that is running in one script.

What does that mean for us? It means that at each moment, anywhere in the code, one simple random.seed(0) can destroy all our collected entropy. We don’t want that. Thankfully, Python provides getstate and setstate methods. So, to save our entropy each time we generate a key, we remember the state we stopped at and set it next time we want to make a key.

Second, we just make sure that our key is in range (1, CURVE_ORDER). This is a requirement for all ECDSA private keys. The CURVE_ORDER is the order of the secp256k1 curve, which is FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364141.

Finally, for convenience, we convert to hex, and strip the ‘0x’ part.

In action

Let’s try to use the library. Actually, it’s really simple: you can generate a private key in three lines of code!

You can see it yourself. The key is random and totally valid. Moreover, each time you run this code, you get different results.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to generate private keys. They differ in simplicity and security.

Generating a private key is only a first step. The next step is extracting a public key and a wallet address that you can use to receive payments. The process of generating a wallet differs for Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I plan to write two more articles on that topic.

If you want to play with the code, I published it to this Github repository.

I am making a course on cryptocurrencies here on freeCodeCamp News. The first part is a detailed description of the blockchain.

I also post random thoughts about crypto on Twitter, so you might want to check it out.