The article basically says that Satoshi went for secp256k1 because for secp256r1 the constants were defined by the NIST under the possible influence of the NSA.

I don't think it is a good argument, I invite every one to take a look at the DES S-Box constants. Many people believed that those were backdoor constants that the NSA planted into the algorithm as there was no explanation on how and why they were chosen. Many years later it turned out that they were picked carefully to protect against differential-linear attacks. An attack only the NSA knew back then. So they gave out safe S-Box constants, and all those who distrusted them and picked random/other S-Boxes were actually screwed, this is really ironic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-box

Garbage spam page. This shouldn't be on HN. There is a common trend for people to take highly technical subjects do a tiny amount of research and then spam up some page (often full of plagiarism) in order to add bulk to their sites. This is especially common in the "defi / ico" fraud ecosystem.

In this case the article is so poorly researched that even though it says fairly little it manages to make outright false claims about basic facts, e.g. "secp256k1 is a Koblitz curve which is defined in a characteristic 2 finite field, while secp256r1 is a prime field curve"-- which is false, secp256k1 uses a prime field.

Well, for one, iirc Secp256r1 was pseudo random and can be seen glowing in broad daylight.

I wonder if you could track down who Satoshi is based on someone's search queries about Secp256k1 specifically

Any recommendations for courses or books that give a 101 intro all the way to understanding these curves and why / how they are used?

I'd like to get a grasp on this from first principles. Thank you!

> secp256k1 is a Koblitz curve which is defined in a characteristic 2 finite field,

Secp256k1's base field size is a 256-bit prime. What does he mean?

If you are interested in comparing curves, here is the djb page on the topic https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/index.html

> These curves were chosen actually for efficiency not security

Isn't this enough?

I wonder if anything is known about the choice of base point, which in compressed form is:

    G = 02 79BE667E F9DCBBAC 55A06295 CE870B07 029BFCDB 2DCE28D9 59F2815B 16F81798

Many applications use a second generator H, which must be an unknown multiple of G. This is achieved by defining it as essentially SHA256(G).

k for konstant?

please refer to him as The Enlightened One