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I need to find the public key of a list of Ethereum addresses. Is it possible to do this only with the transaction hash of one of their transactions? Per Get public key of any ethereum account the v, r and s values of the signature when a transaction is sent is also required. Using web3.eth.getTransactionReceipt for example doesn't bring back this information.

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Without a signature, there's no way to get the public key (short of someone giving it to you). So for an address that has never made a transaction, this can't be done.

(I'm not sure where getTransactionReceipt comes in. If you're calling that, then surely the account has made a transaction, so you can recover the public key.)

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  • These would be for addresses that have made a transaction somewhere at some point (so I could find a transaction hash to look at for them) but I don't know how to get the v, r and s value for any transaction which seems to be required for finding the public key. Of course using web3.eth.sign returns v, r and s values but these accounts wouldn't be interacting with my website, I only have already-existing publicly viewable transactions to work with.
    – ZhouW
    Mar 11, 2018 at 6:49
  • eth_getTransactionByHash will give you the v, r, and s values for a transaction.
    – user19510
    Mar 11, 2018 at 6:51
  • (That's web3.eth.getTransaction if you're using web3.js.)
    – user19510
    Mar 11, 2018 at 6:52
  • thanks - the docs at github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/… don't mention that as bringing back v, r and s values
    – ZhouW
    Mar 11, 2018 at 7:02

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