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I'm looking at creating a deterministic wallet for some of the less popular altcoins. Bitcoin has a magic byte of '0488b21e' and litecoin '019da462'. How are these determined or calculated? Also how would I generate these values for other altcoins?
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0x0488B21E is the extended public key prefix / version bytes (as described in BIP32) and stands for xpub. In the same manner, 0x019DA462 stands for Ltub.
For bitcoin and litecoin these codes are:
Network Extended private Version bytes Extended public Version bytes
key prefix key prefix
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bitcoin main xprv 0x0488ADE4 xpub 0x0488B21E
Bitcoin testnet tprv 0x04358394 tpub 0x043587CF
Litecoin main Ltpv 0x019D9CFE Ltub 0x019DA462
Litecoin testnet ttpv 0x0436EF7D ttub 0x0436F6E1
How do you go about calculating these values? For example for auroracoin the prefix might be Arub. – greatwitenorth – 2015-01-10T21:08:33.233
Note that the 'version byte' is different from the private key prefix. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_address_prefixes
– Nick ODell – 2015-01-09T21:55:39.453Late response I realize, but see here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/28380/i-want-to-generate-a-bip32-version-number-for-namecoin-and-other-altcoins/56639#56639
– Christopher Gurnee – 2017-07-13T21:04:54.090