# Re: We accept Bitcoins

Post by: satoshi on May 20, 2010, 09:43:42 PM

Quote from: DataWraith on May 19, 2010, 07:52:42 PM

> Can I just butt in with a question on why that is? To me it seems that if Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography to transfer ownership of the coins, it should be a trivial matter to include a short message that is only readable by the recipient.

Almost but not quite.  Bitcoin uses EC-DSA, which can only do digital signing, not encryption.  RSA can do both, but I didn't use it because it's an order of magnitude bigger and would have been impractical.

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