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Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2014 17:38:22 -0700
Message-ID: <CAAS2fgT22HdS=MQU4B1vWUUKDk+pJiLGmGnBF9E9Zcs_swTN3g@mail.gmail.com>
From: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
To: Nikita Schmidt <nikita@megiontechnologies.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Cc: bitcoin-development <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>,
	Matt Whitlock <bip@mattwhitlock.name>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Presenting a BIP for Shamir's Secret
 Sharing of Bitcoin private keys
Precedence: list

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 5:33 PM, Nikita Schmidt
<nikita@megiontechnologies.com> wrote:
> Regarding the choice of fields, any implementation of this BIP will
> need big integer arithmetic to do base-58 anyway.

Nah, it doesn't. E.g.
https://gitorious.org/bitcoin/libblkmaker/source/eb33f9c8e441ffef457a79d76ceed1ea20ab3059:base58.c

> However, the maths in GF(2^8) is so simple that this
> additional complexity can be considered negligible.
[...]
> Uniform processing of secrets of any size (instead of using different
> primes for different cases) is a valid argument in favour of GF(2^8),
> though.  I have no preference one way or another.

I think this is really one of the bigger selling points.