secp256k1 VS RavenStash

Just yesterday I was trying to generate a vanity pub key for Nostr. I was using https://github.com/kdmukai/nostr_vanity_npub which uses the python-nostr library which in turn uses https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1.

The test (single thread with -j1 flag) has some interesting result. Time taken to calculate 1 million keys:

i7 8650U=2m5s,

However, I am trying to find the answer in the Bitcoin core source code, but it's kind of hard to read and could find an answer to it there.

I will be working on a Schnorr batch verification interface for the libsecp256k1. For those unfamiliar with libsecp256k1, it is a library (written in C) used by Bitcoin Core for low-level cryptographic operations. Initially, this library was a personal project of Pieter Wuille, which was later integrated into Bitcoin Core. You can listen to this Chaincode podcast where he talks about the early developments of this library.

That's a binding to the C library https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1, so it causes the exact same issue OP had with Cryptonite.

The binary GCD has inferior performance to other approaches for big numbers because those min() comparisons require that you had to update the entire numbers at each step.

I submitted a writeup on the safegcd algorithm used by libsecp256k1 a while back, but it got the HN zomg-bitcoin-related quick flagging: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/blob/master/doc/sa...

Safegcd-like functions requires somewhat more iterations but most of the iterations need to only operate on the least significant bits of the numbers, which makes them faster in practice.

For safegcd-ish functions proving a hard upper bound on the number of require iterations is non-trivial. But it's useful to prove the bound in order to make constant time versions. Here is a writeup on our techniques for proving the upper bounds: https://github.com/sipa/safegcd-bounds#bounds-on-divsteps-it...

[4:23 PM] fdov: Soulless | Scamcoin.onlinehttps://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/issues/451

And the one from libsecp256k1 (which underlies Bitcoin) and is optimized for HMAC: - https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/blob/master/src/hash_impl.h

Just build and benckmark this https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1

[4:38 PM] Jeroz: I saw the tweet. Do all points at https://github.com/fdoving/RavenStash/blob/main/testing-4.7.0test.md need testing on MacOS? Or only specific ones? "Test OSX binaries on various versions of OSX" is rather vague and broad.

[5:53 PM] fdov: I made https://github.com/fdoving/RavenStash/blob/main/testing-4.7.0test.md - to help with the testing. It's kind of my selection of things that should be tested before release.

Tasks: https://github.com/fdoving/RavenStash/blob/main/tasks-4.7.0test.md

[5:13 PM] fdov: If you want a new release, please help testing: https://github.com/fdoving/RavenStash/blob/main/testing-4.7.0test.md