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CH04::privkey formats: add sidebar about format relevancy

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Most software today doesn't export or import private keys, so add a
sidebar noting that this section is mainly for historical reasons.
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David A. Harding 2023-02-09 18:59:18 -10:00
parent bdf31e90af
commit 8c5b2fd291
1 changed files with 25 additions and 0 deletions
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@ -946,6 +946,31 @@ internally in software and rarely shown to users. The WIF is used for
import/export of keys between wallets and often used in QR code
(barcode) representations of private keys.
.Modern relevancy of private key formats
****
Early Bitcoin wallet software generated one or more independent private
keys when a new user wallet was initialized. When the initial set of
keys had all been used, the wallet might generate additional private
keys. Individual private keys could be exported or imported. Any time
new private keys were generated or imported, a new backup of the wallet
needed to be created.
Later Bitcoin wallets began using deterministic wallets where all
private keys are generated from a single seed value. These wallets only
ever need to be backed up once for typical onchain use. However, if a
user exports a single private key from one of these wallets and an
attacker acquires that key plus some non-private data about the wallet,
they can potentially derive any private key in the wallet--allowing the
attacker to steal all of the wallet funds. Additionally, keys cannot be
imported into deterministic wallets. This means almost no modern
wallets support the ability to export or import an individual key. The
information in this section is mainly of interest to anyone needing
compatibility with early Bitcoin wallets.
For more information, see <<hd_wallets>>.
****
[[table_4-2]]
.Private key representations (encoding formats)
[options="header"]