Can a Bitcoin address be used to verify a signature made with a given private key?

Question

Problem: I have a Bitcoin address, ie 1EHNa6Q4Jz2uvNExL497mE43ikXhwF6kZm. And I have a list of private keys which I am not sure where this address was derived from. I want to find out which of these private keys has derived that address (through public key). For the address above, the private key is 1 (00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 01).

Per my understanding, there are different ways of deriving public keys from a private key (ECDSA being the most common, but also HD/BIP 32 | https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Private_key ). And then, from the public key, a BTC address can be generated (via multiple hashings and other operations | https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address ), which makes it impossible to find the public key from a Bitcoin address.

If my assumptions above are correct, my question is: is it still possible to validate the relation between a private key and a Bitcoin address?

I wanted to sign a message with the private key and use a public key to validate that. Since I don't have the public key, I would have to derive one from the private key and then generate a Bitcoin address to compare with the one I have. But, then, what if the address was generated with the HD/BIP 32 method?

PS: I am using BouncyCastle and NBitcoin libs to run the tests.

Answer 1

If you are using Bitcoin Core and you want to know the Private Key that belongs to one of your addresses, go to Console or use RPC and call dumpprivkey "myaddress" .

And throw the Private Key on WIF format.