Releasing several open-source Bitcoin research tools (vanity search, early block analysis, and an experimental key derivation project)

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was experimenting with a different approach to elliptic curve analysis and said I’d share the code once it was in a state I was comfortable releasing. I’m starting to publish pieces of that work under the Chainborn organization.

The repositories include:

A vanity address prefix search implementation.

Tooling for analyzing the flow of early mined Bitcoin blocks.

An experimental project exploring private key derivation from elliptic curve (x, y) coordinates.

For the last project, I’m not asking anyone to accept any claims at face value. To make it easier to evaluate, the initial release will be constrained to Bitcoin puzzle key ranges so the implementation can be tested against known datasets before attempting anything more ambitious. My goal is to get technical feedback on the implementation, assumptions, and methodology. If you have experience with secp256k1, ECC, or Bitcoin internals, I’d appreciate critical review more than speculation. I’ll be publishing the repositories under an open-source license as I finish cleaning them up.

P.S. One of the repositories I’ll be releasing contains the implementation I used to derive the private keys for the solved Bitcoin Puzzle #125 and #130 challenges. The release includes the code and methodology so others can inspect, reproduce, and evaluate the results for themselves.