+The second option offers the greatest compatibility with existing key generation systems, where the standard 33-byte compressed public key format consists of a byte indicating the oddness of the Y coordinate, plus the full X coordinate. To avoid gratuitous incompatibilities, we pick that option for ''P'', and thus our X-only public keys become equivalent to a compressed public key that is the X-only key prefixed by the byte 0x02. For consistency, the same is done for ''R''<ref>An earlier version of this draft used the third option instead, based on a belief that this would in general trade signing efficiency for verification efficiency. When using Jacobian coordinates, a common optimization in ECC implementations, it is possible to determine if a Y coordinate is a quadratic residue by computing the Legendre symbol, without converting to affine coordinates first (which needs a modular inversion). As modular inverses and Legendre symbols have similar [https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2020-August/018081.html performance] in practice, this trade-off is not worth it.</ref>.
0 commit comments