A Brief on Private Keys & Wallets
Before we dive into the subject, let’s go over a brief primer on Bitcoin private key standards and how they have evolved over time. A private key is a 256-bit number, picked at random and defined by an elliptic curve, specifically secp256k1. At the end of this process, you get a very long string of digits (64 hexadecimal digits). Other formats for representing a private key also exist, such as WIF and WIF-Compressed.

In order to make this a bit more convenient to read, Base58 encoding is used to shorten the string of numbers and letters, as well as limit the ones that are used to avoid confusion to the human eye.

You can use any one of the above formats as the representation of your private key. However, there are notable differences in their respective generation and representation of the public key and addresses when it comes to wallets :