How to convert multichain private key to ECDSA pem format?

Question

Is there a way to take a multichain private key (from the output of dumpprivkey) and convert it into an EDCSA pem format? The intent is to use the private key for x509 certificate signing

Answer 1

I'm afraid we don't have an easy answer for you, but if you Google how to convert a bitcoin private key to PEM format you'll find quite a lot of discussion and suggestions. That will work the same for a MultiChain private key, with the exception of possibly different version bytes in the base58 representation, described here:

https://www.multichain.com/developers/address-key-format/

Comments

Thank you for your response. I guess I will have to do further research on the topic. However, would you be able to confirm if what I plan to do is even possible? Reading the private key description, it seems there are some irreversible steps taken when converting a raw EDCSA private key to a multichain private key, such as the double SHA-256 hashing. I imagine that in order to generate a pem file I would need to be able to get the raw EDCSA private key from the results of `dumpprivkey`, would this be possible?

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The hashing is only applied to build the checksum part which is added to the end of the MultiChain private key. The ECDSA private key itself is still preserved in full within the MultiChain private key.