Bitcoin

Because I can, I recently added support for testnet Bitcoin Lightning payments into this website. The beauty of Freedom and privacy respecting software is that you can do anything you want with it. There are many ways to do it. You can always use a service, provider for that, but the beauty of Bitcoin, the reason it is valuable, is that you can do it yourself.

Bitcoin is this strange thing I don’t fully understand. Going down the rabbit hole, as it is commonly known, I generally feel disappointed. Every bitcoiner I meet is a fanatic insisting that I buy bitcoin instead of a supportive mentor. The best buys of my life took place under guidance not pressure, thus I’m always reluctant to listen.

The previous posts covered mathematical curiosities. Now we can leave that realm, find an application and turn them into tools to work with elliptic curve cryptography. That means finding and choosing which particular values of the parameters bring us into a curve we can use for cryptography.

When merging the last two posts, I immediately run into serious difficulties. Haskell’s type system just made my work harder(well my ignorance did). Until I could come up with a solution, I could not appreciate how the strictness of the type system actually gives flexibility.

In this series of posts I’m solving the exercises of Programming Bitcoin1 in Haskell, I’m learning Bitcoin and Haskell in one go. To describe a point in the elliptic curve, we need four data points. \((x, y)\) are the coordinates themselves, additionally we need the constants \((a, b)\) that define the elliptic curve given by the equation \(y^2 = x^3 + ax +b\).