I'm looking at creating a deterministic wallet for some of the less popular altcoins. Bitcoin has a magic byte of '0488b21e' and litecoin '019da462'. How are these determined or calculated? Also how would I generate these values for other altcoins?
1 Answer
0x0488B21E
is the extended public key prefix / version bytes (as described in BIP32) and stands for xpub
. In the same manner, 0x019DA462
stands for Ltub
.
For bitcoin and litecoin these codes are:
Network Extended private Version bytes Extended public Version bytes
key prefix key prefix
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bitcoin main xprv 0x0488ADE4 xpub 0x0488B21E
Bitcoin testnet tprv 0x04358394 tpub 0x043587CF
Litecoin main Ltpv 0x019D9CFE Ltub 0x019DA462
Litecoin testnet ttpv 0x0436EF7D ttub 0x0436F6E1
-
How do you go about calculating these values? For example for auroracoin the prefix might be Arub. Jan 10, 2015 at 21:08