Until now, every Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) that needed cryptographic primitives had to reinvent the wheel. Each one came bundled with its own custom Python implementation of the secp256k1 elliptic curve and related algorithms, each subtly different from one another. These inconsistencies introduced quiet liabilities and made reviewing BIPs unnecessarily complicated. This problem was recently highlighted in Bitcoin Optech Newsletter #348, and it’s something at least a handful of developers in the Bitcoin development community have long felt: there should be a unified, reusable standard for cryptographic BIP reference secp256k1 code.

Last week, Jonas Nick and Tim Ruffing…

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