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 17:38:22 -0700

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

> However, the maths in GF(2^8) is so simple that this
> additional complexity can be considered negligible.
[...]
> Uniform processing of secrets of any size (instead of using different
> primes for different cases) is a valid argument in favour of GF(2^8),
> though.  I have no preference one way or another.

I think this is really one of the bigger selling points.