Hello all, I just submitted a pull request (#649) that enables the use of compressed public keys in Bitcoin. As discovered by roconnor (IRC), this is possible in such a way that old clients verify and relay them without problems. They are supported by default by OpenSSL, and all alternative implementations that use OpenSSL should support these keys just fine as well.
Compressed public keys are 33 bytes long, and contain the same information as normal 65-byte keys. They only contain the X coordinate of the point, while the value of the Y-coordinate is reconstructed upon use. This requires some CPU, but only a fraction of the cost of verifying a signature. In theory, one private key now corresponds to two public keys, and thus two different addresses. As this would probably cause confusion, this implementation chooses only one of them (at key generation time). All keys generated when -compressedpubkeys is active, are compressed, and their reported address is that corresponding to its compressed pubkey. Things that need attention: * Do all client implementations support it? * How to represent secrets for compressed pubkeys? * send-to-pubkey transactions are untested, for now -- Pieter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-novd2d _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
