What does it mean to digitally sign 📝 a transaction with your private key? And how does signing look like for a @Stacks transaction? Interestingly, there are some shared signing nuances in both Bitcoin & Stacks (STX) 🧵

1/ To digitally sign a transaction means to attest that your proposed message to a blockchain is coming from you, the owner of a 🔑. That message may contain state changes to a contract or to asset ownership, both of which require that you are authorized to make those changes.

2/ The act of digitally signing entails performing cryptography on your message and 🔑. The result is your signature, which gets inserted into the transaction payload. The signature attests that YOU are the originator of everything that will happen in this proposed transaction.

3/ The specific cryptography used in Stacks (STX) is the same as used in Bitcoin: ECDSA over the secp256k1 cryptographic curve. This signature scheme is also common in many other blockchains and has become an industry standard.

4/ The unopinionated nature of stacks.js allows one to create an unsigned transaction, which can then be passed to ANY signing tool that has a compatible libsecp256k1 implementation.

5/ Signing with stacks.js is also possible but the beauty of it is that you are not restricted to it. There are many wallet solutions in web3 that you could leverage. For instance, trending embedded wallet infra solutions, such as @turnkeyhq, can sign Stacks (STX) transactions.