The peer id / key spec currently says we use the "Standard bitcoin encoding" for secp256k1 keys, but there are a few different potentially valid encodings for public keys.
The one we actually use is the compressed form, which only stores the X coordinate and a flag for the sign and uses 33 bytes. There are apparently two different 65-byte encodings as well, looking at the btcd code.
Anyway, we should specify the encoding we're using. It's probably worth just spelling it out, rather than trying to link to an external spec.
Warchant
commented
5 years ago
The peer id / key spec currently says we use the "Standard bitcoin encoding" for secp256k1 keys, but there are a few different potentially valid encodings for public keys.
The one we actually use is the compressed form, which only stores the X coordinate and a flag for the sign and uses 33 bytes. There are apparently two different 65-byte encodings as well, looking at the btcd code.
Anyway, we should specify the encoding we're using. It's probably worth just spelling it out, rather than trying to link to an external spec.