Posts

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 \(y^2 = x^3 + ax +b\).

Bitcoin’s price has gone crazy up, and now I’m really responsible for learning it. I found the book Programming Bitcoin1 by Jimmy Song, it looks good enough to give it a try. It uses Python to teach, which is uninteresting and I end up only skimming over it, which leads to low retention.

There are plenty of reasons: Get out of your comfort zone, build character, discover your limits. There are plenty of justifications: Simply crazy, settling a bet, religious penitence/purification. All those might apply, however for me it was a CELEBRATION. A celebration of how well I’m doing nowadays.