Yeah the thinking was quantum computing is probably bullshit so why not expose the pubkey. It lets you do all kinds of cool key tweaking crypto tricks. But then they also did x only pubkeys and handicapped key tweaking. lol oops
Discussion
Well fuck around and find out I guess!
Yeah we'll probably remove x-only pubkeys in a future soft fork.
Tangential question but are you aware of a graphical visualizer that shows the identification of a public key on the curve being generated? That would be neat to watch if it started slowly the. Ramped up fast so you could show someone visually why it infeasible to brute force reverse it.
Not off the top of my head. I've seen something like this before and the more technically accurate it is the less sense it makes.
I think part of ECDSA has you modulo the point over a reduced range so in practice it jumps all over the place and doesn't display a smoothe curve. It looks like a bunch of dots randomly appearing on a Cartesian plane.