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It's the same with the crypto we rely on. There are some quite complex mathematical underpinnings for the primitives, but once understand their properties all the common protocols are actually incredibly trivial. DSA and various other iconic crypto protocols are just linear algebra using these new mathematical primitives. The complexity is about the same as using hash functions to build hash tables. Making protocols secure is actually mostly an implementation challenge (as it is with hash tables), and keeping systems secure, pragmatically, is about key management and social challenges.

I was incredibly proud when I noticed, just through algebraic manipulation, without reading it anywhere first, that you should be able to extract the public key used to create an an ECDSA signature. Schnorr signatures don't have this property. This is kind of sad in a way becaue it's trivial, but you have no know how the primitive functions and the difference between a field and a group.



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