Discussion on: You Wouldn't Base64 a Password! Cryptography Terms and Concepts for Developers

[Mihail Malo]

Given a public key, it is almost impossible to figure out what the private key is.
Given a private key, you can near-instantly calculate the related public key.

Is this really so?
I thought the two were essentially two sides of the same coin, and we just arbitrarily choose one to be the private key and hide it and publish the remaining one.

[Scott Arciszewski]

I thought the two were essentially two sides of the same coin, and we just arbitrarily choose one to be the private key and hide it and publish the remaining one

Nope! See also: 3v4l.org/ZJNVT

[Mihail Malo]

We have to go more public!

array(5) {
  ["secret key"]=>
  string(64) "2337c49553ee014b5deeb0506015dde1256236468aa83e2a0014eaa3178aba82"
  ["public key"]=>
  string(64) "a393199a4e8333d558d0832909d7bb3966280f0e0139f718fb903f2bd032362d"
  ["public key from secret key"]=>
  string(64) "a393199a4e8333d558d0832909d7bb3966280f0e0139f718fb903f2bd032362d"
  ["super public key from public key"]=>
  string(64) "63079d6d457e7ef05e31a65c7b08a3fff2971b9e2943954565725b69f0754627"
  ["super super public key from super public key"]=>
  string(64) "ec3f52bde73b8026c0bb00ccc0a936529e617b9b3233ec0e02d95d3f5c1fe344"
}