Author: Pieter Wuille 2011-12-18 15:42:06
Published on: 2011-12-18T15:42:06+00:00
In a discussion about Bitcoin's transaction format, Jorge Timón questioned the idea of saving space by including the whole public key, instead of just the address hash, in each output. The reason for this is that the current method of using addresses in outputs and the full pubkey plus signature in inputs requires more space than using send-to-pubkey transactions, where the output contains the pubkey and the input contains the signature. Several possible improvements were suggested, including using compressed public keys, compact signatures, and pubkey recovery, all of which would save space. These improvements could be combined in different ways to propose different types of transactions. Gregory Maxwell created a table comparing these options, which shows that all proposed options are better than the current send-to-address method. However, the advantages of using these new methods may be smaller if pruning is implemented in the future.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T22:51:22.288804+00:00