How to derive public key of wallet address?

Question

Hi,

How can I get the public key for a wallet address? The purpose is I want to encrypt something using the recipient's public key which he can presumably decrypt since he has his private key.

I can see that getaddresses api call with verbose=true shows the pubkey for each address, but this is only for addresses stored in the current node's wallet. What if the address is from another node?

Thanks

Answer 1

A blockchain address is calculated as a hash of the public key, and there's no way to reverse this mapping. So your best bet would be to use a stream in which address holders can publish their public key, and then use liststreampublisheritems to retrieve it. (Actually as soon as someone has signed a transaction, their public key is revealed to the blockchain as part of that signature, although this may be a little less convenient to extract.)