Tool
Walk the full one way path from a private key to its Bitcoin address: elliptic curve multiplication, hashing, base58check. Accepts hex or WIF and shows both possible P2PKH addresses. Everything runs locally in your browser: your key never leaves this page.
Paste a key above. The elliptic curve math runs instantly, entirely in your browser.
The derivation is a chain of one way steps. First, the private key (a number) is multiplied by the secp256k1 generator point to produce the public key, a point on the elliptic curve. This page uses the audited @noble/curves library for that step, the same code that powers many production wallets, not homemade math. Then the public key is hashed with SHA-256 followed by RIPEMD-160, prefixed with a version byte, given a checksum, and base58 encoded into the familiar address starting with 1.
Why two addresses? A public key can be written in full (uncompressed, 65 bytes) or with just the x coordinate and a parity bit (compressed, 33 bytes). The two encodings hash to different addresses, so one private key controls two possible P2PKH addresses. Modern software uses the compressed form. If you arrived here from a WIF key, the compression flag inside it tells you which address a wallet would import.
Every step forward is fast; going backward is the hard problem the whole system rests on. The Bitcoin Puzzle measures exactly that difficulty with real prizes, and you can verify any solved puzzle right here: paste its revealed key and watch the puzzle address come out. Pair this tool with hex to WIF for format conversion, or check the derived address's balance with the balance checker.
The usual caution applies: never paste the private key of a funded wallet into any website. Use this for study, verification and puzzle work only.