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

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 19:07:45 -0700

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 6:46 PM, Matt Whitlock <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 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.

Yes thats only a decode but the same process (long division with
manual carries) works just fine the other way. There is absolutely no
need to use big integers for this.