Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm or ECDSA is a cryptographic algorithm used by Bitcoin to ensure that funds can only be spent by their rightful owners. It is dependent on the curve order and hash function used. For bitcoin these are Secp256k1 and SHA256(SHA256()) respectively.| en.bitcoin.it
This is a graph of secp256k1's elliptic curve y2 = x3 + 7 over the real numbers. Note that because secp256k1 is actually defined over the field Zp, its graph will in reality look like random scattered points, not anything like this.secp256k1 refers to the parameters of the elliptic curve used in Bitcoin's public-key cryptography, and is defined in Standards for Efficient Cryptography (SEC) (Certicom Research, http://www.secg.org/sec2-v2.pdf). Currently Bitcoin uses secp256k1 with the ECDSA al...| en.bitcoin.it