Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Presenting a BIP for Shamir's Secret Sharing of Bitcoin private keys

From: Matt Whitlock <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 21:46:21 -0400

On Monday, 7 April 2014, at 5:38 pm, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Nikita Schmidt
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > Regarding the choice of fields, any implementation of this BIP will
> > need big integer arithmetic to do base-58 anyway.
> 
> Nah, it doesn't. E.g.
> https://gitorious.org/bitcoin/libblkmaker/source/eb33f9c8e441ffef457a79d76ceed1ea20ab3059:base58.c

That only *decodes* Base58Check. It has no encode function, which would require biginteger division.