Why is an invalid pubkey accepted in the blockchain?

3

while trying to understand the address validation process, I fell upon this block : https://blockchain.info/tx/3d29f43a3278281192943276049c15e5f0d8c7e75d4d99a4cd6693113a948f48 In the outputs, the first two are regular pay-to-hash, but the last one is a pay-to-pubKey (the block was mentioned by the developers from blockchain.info as a bad solution to embed an ASCII message in the blockchain). My question is : as this pubKey is invalid, where does the address (1Du8MpTTV4VrQMHtgP4mG1Fq9q3ykb3L8h) come from ? I could not manage to get it by hashing the pubKey...

thanks

user13404

Posted 2014-02-12T17:19:52.217

Reputation: 33

Answers

1

Why is an invalid pubkey accepted in the blockchain?

It was intended as a message, not as a public key. It is accepted in the blockchain because it is a valid output script, whether or not it is spendable is not relevant.

Where does the address 1Du8MpTTV4VrQMHtgP4mG1Fq9q3ykb3L8h come from?

That address is a result of the software blockchain.info uses to generate an address from an output script. Why or how that works is something you'll have to ask whoever wrote it.

Jesse Busman

Posted 2014-02-12T17:19:52.217

Reputation: 124

Thanks, and for the base 58 address, I was padding it with zeroes to get a standard ECDSA key but actually hashing it normally works... – user13404 – 2014-02-13T10:43:18.623

Asked: 2014-02-12T17:19:52.217

Viewed: 188 times

Active: 2014-02-12T17:48:36.820