Bitcoin Address Generator

This project is a Bitcoin address generator written in Rust. It leverages various cryptographic libraries to generate a Bitcoin address, along with the corresponding public and private keys. The project is designed to be installed and run via Cargo, the Rust package manager.

Features

• Generate a random private key.
• Derive the corresponding public key from the private key.
• Compute the Bitcoin address from the public key.
• Optionally accept a user-provided private key and version.

Installation

To install this project, ensure you have Rust and Cargo installed on your system. You can install it directly from crates.io or from the source.

Install from crates.io

To install the Bitcoin address generator directly from crates.io, use the following command:

cargo install btc-addgen

Install from source

To install from the source, clone this repository and navigate to its directory, then run the following command:

cargo build --release

Usage

Using the compiled binary

./target/release/bitcoin_address_generator [OPTIONS]

Using the installed cargo binary

btc-addgen [OPTIONS]

Command-line Options

• -p, --private-key <PRIVATE_KEY>: Specify a private key in hexadecimal format.
• -v, --version <VERSION>: Specify the version byte in hexadecimal format (e.g., 0x00 for mainnet).
• -u, --use-uncompressed <USE_UNCOMPRESSED>: Specify if the address should be made from compressed pub key (defaults to false).

Example

Generate a Bitcoin address with a random private key:

./target/release/bitcoin_address_generator

Generate a Bitcoin address using a specific private key and version:

./target/release/bitcoin_address_generator -p <PRIVATE_KEY> -v <VERSION>

Dependencies

The project relies on several external crates for cryptographic operations:

• base58check: For Base58Check encoding.
• rand: For random number generation.
• ripemd: For RIPEMD-160 hashing.
• secp256k1: For elliptic curve operations.
• sha2: For SHA-256 hashing.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.

Acknowledgements

This project uses various cryptographic libraries and builds upon standard Bitcoin address generation techniques. Special thanks to the authors of the base58check, rand, ripemd, secp256k1, and sha2 crates for their invaluable work.