The Wonderful World of Digital Signatures: ECDSA, EdDSA, BLS, CL, Merkle, and so much more
Although we hardly ever use our wet signature, the methods we used with these are still around. We thus live in a fake digital signature world, and where your DocuSign signature looks more like the signature of Donald Trump than your own one. And when we look at signatures, what are we signing against? With our fake wet signatures, can we actually prove that the thing we are signing has not been changed? In Scotland, the PDF for vaccination status, for example, is an editable PDF document. It is all very much fake digital. Luckily, the App contained a signed version of vaccine status and which was digitally signed by the NHS.
The King of the Signatures: ECDSA
For all its faults, it is Bitcoin that shows the greatest potential for properly integrating digital signatures, and where we can base a trusted transfer of currency from one person to another. For this Satoshi selected the ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm), and used the secp256k1 curve. He/she perhaps just plucked it randomly, but it has worked well for over a decade and has been relatively free of problems (apart from developers not selecting random nonce values, of course). Ethereum, too, also uses ECDSA and secp256k1.
