Storing and loading the private key #672

1. 
   kroggen commented at 3:42 am on October 11, 2019: none

   Hi!

   Congrats for the great software! It is way faster than OpenSSL.

   I was not able to find how to store and load the private key. Preferably in a small binary format.

2. 
   kroggen commented at 4:10 am on October 11, 2019: none

   Analyzing the code I could notice that the private key is not stored on the context. I was used with mbed-crypto where it is the opposite.

   So we are responsible for generating the private key with a strong RNG, checking if it is valid with the secp256k1_ec_seckey_verify function (or secp256k1_ec_privkey_verify when renamed), storing it and loading it.

   A documentation on README would be helpful.

   Cheers,

3. kroggen closed this on Oct 11, 2019

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4. kroggen cross-referenced this on Oct 11, 2019 from issue Add basic usage information on README [skip ci] by kroggen
5. 
   real-or-random commented at 5:07 am on October 11, 2019: contributor

   Have you seen the header file? https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/blob/master/include/secp256k1.h

   It has a good documentation but I admit there’s no general section on usage of the library.

   Related to #184 .

6. 
   nickfarrow commented at 11:46 pm on March 24, 2020: none

   For anyone else interested in how to generate keys using this library, feel free to checkout my Bitcoin vanity address generator which I think provides a short and reasonably well commented example of how to generate private and public key pairs.

Contributors
kroggen real-or-random nickfarrow