** Unpacking the History of Bitcoin’s Key Types: Uncompressed vs.
The cryptocurrency community has long been curious about how Bitcoin’s public keys have evolved over time. “03” and “04”. In
Uncompressed Key Prefixes: 02, 03, and 04
Historically, Bitcoin’s Public Key Format consisted of a prefix followed by a hexadecimal number (the public key) and then a checksum. Keys are:
02: Uncompressed Key Without Any Additional Information
03: compressed key using the zmq compression scheme (More on this later)
04: compressed key using the GPG Compression Scheme
The use of these prefix characters dates back to the early days of Bitcoin. In fact, the first block that was mined in december 2009 used the 02 prefix.
COMSSED KEYS: ZMQ AND GPG
In recent years, Bitcoin’s Public Keys have undergone significant changes due to advances in compression algorithms. Two Popular compression schemes are:
- ZMQ (Zero Message queues):
- GPG (GNU Privacy Guard):
2017 Hard Fork, Known as the “Segregated Witness” update. This update added support for multiple compression schemes to improve security and reduce transmission overhead.
Prefixes Update?
After conducting research, The majority of Bitcoin users and developers seems to use 02,03, or 04.
The 04 prefix was introduced in 2018 as part of the segregated witness (segwit) upgrade, which is due to improving scalability and security for the network.
Conclusion
02 02Preefix before consecressed keys Introduced as part of the segregated fitness update. While compressed keys were added in 2018, uncompressed keys have not always used a04prefix. Our research sucks that users and developmented either02, 03, or04` for uncompressed keys.
As Bitcoin continues to evolve Key Format, Check Your Blockchain Data to see