Author: Pieter Wuille 2011-11-21 02:34:30
Published on: 2011-11-21T02:34:30+00:00
A pull request (#649) has been submitted to enable the use of compressed public keys in Bitcoin. These keys are 33 bytes long and contain only the X coordinate of the point, while the value of the Y-coordinate is reconstructed upon use, which requires some CPU but only a fraction of the cost of verifying a signature. This implementation chooses only one address out of two possible addresses created by one private key corresponding to two public keys for compressed pubkeys at key generation time to avoid confusion.According to roconnor (IRC), old clients can verify and relay these keys without any problems as they are supported by default by OpenSSL and all alternative implementations that use OpenSSL should support them as well. However, it remains to be seen if all client implementations support compressed public keys. Additionally, there is a need to figure out how to represent secrets for compressed pubkeys. Lastly, send-to-pubkey transactions are untested for now and require attention.
Updated on: 2023-05-18T22:27:11.047152+00:00