Resurrection

Dear Visitor, I used to read royalforkblog.com and reference many others to it. It was an excellent blog about Bitcoin and especially about some of the underlying principles. I am the type of learner that profits extensively from the graphical and interactive style the blogger “rf” used to explain these rather complex matters. It was certainly my favorite Bitcoin blog and the Article on Eliptic Curves Digital Signatures is a true masterpiece. have you ever though that you could never understand the math behind these signatures? Take an hour to read it and play with the interctive elements.

Btc-PGP

Because email encryption has been on the minds of many during the past year and a half, and GPG has recently released a “modern” version of their email encryption software supporting elliptic curve cryptography, I thought it would be fun to combine PGP encrypted email with the bitcoin blockchain.

Testnet Faucet API

Testnet is an almost-exact clone of bitcoin, except the bitcoins on testnet are valueless (the testnet blockchain resets every once in a while). It's much smaller than the bitcoin block chain, and allows developers (and beta testers) to test out apps without the risk of losing money if something goes wrong. I've provided an API which lets you transfer testnet bitcoins to an address of your choosing.

Deconstructing Transactions

Today we learn how bitcoin transactions are made. Transactions are the heart of bitcoin, and learning about their inner workings illuminates many of the mysteries and complexities of the rest of the bitcoin system. There are several different types of transactions, but I’ll limit my explanation to the most common type of transaction called “pay to pubkey hash”, which is a fancy way of describing the normal peer to peer transactions which everyone knows and loves.

Layman's Guide to Elliptic Curve Digital Signatures

In preparation for this post, I’ve read several research papers, a book, listened to 4 university lectures, idled away hours on IRC, developed elliptic curve libraries in 2 seperate languages, and built my own elliptic curve graphing framework. Elliptic curve cryuptography is hard to wrap your head around. As one of the fundamental crypto systems making Bitcoin a “crypto”-currency, I really wanted to understand the underlying technical aspects which make this form of cryptography secure. This post is an attempt to demystify the elliptic curve digital signing algorithm which underlies bitcoin’s psuedo-anonymous identity system.

Graphical Address Generator

Gaze into the inner workings of a bitcoin address.

Tutorial - Address Generation

In this tutorial, we’ll be creating our own Bitcoin addresses in Ruby. The easy way uses the bitcoin-ruby gem, but this doesn’t teach us much; so we’ll do it ourselves using only basic hashing and an elliptic curve cryptography libraries.

About Royal Fork

A “royal fork” is a chess tactic where a single piece attacks the opponent’s king and queen simultaneously.