I think it's just an oversight. We should specify that we use the standard
encoding from section 2.3 of http://www.secg.org/sec1-v2.pdf except that
we allow only compressed public keys.

Andrew


On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 11:12:48PM +0200, Tim Ruffing via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Is it intentional that the encoding of public (and private) keys is
> unspecified? I'd consider at least the encoding of the public key to be
> part of the signature scheme, so ideally it should be specified already
> in this BIP. On the other hand, there may be good arguments against it,
> but I'm not aware of any.
>
> This issue leads to a discrepancy between the specification and the
> test vectors because the data fields of test vectors "are given as byte
> arrays", including public and secret key. As a consequence, even the
> Python reference implementation in the BIP draft doesn't work on test
> vectors (in a strict sense).
>
> Best,
> Tim
>
>
> On Fri, 2018-07-06 at 11:08 -0700, Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > Here is a proposed BIP for 64-byte elliptic curve Schnorr signatures,
> > over the same curve as is currently used in ECDSA:
> > https://github.com/sipa/bips/blob/bip-schnorr/bip-schnorr.mediawiki
> >
> > It is simply a draft specification of the signature scheme itself. It
> > does not concern consensus rules, aggregation, or any other
> > integration into Bitcoin - those things are left for other proposals,
> > which can refer to this scheme if desirable. Standardizing the
> > signature scheme is a first step towards that, and as it may be
> > useful
> > in other contexts to have a common Schnorr scheme available, it is
> > its
> > own informational BIP.
> >
> > If accepted, we'll work on more production-ready reference
> > implementations and tests.
> >
> > This is joint work with several people listed in the document.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
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> bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
>

--
Andrew Poelstra
Mathematics Department, Blockstream
Email: apoelstra at wpsoftware.net
Web:   https://www.wpsoftware.net/andrew

"A goose alone, I suppose, can know the loneliness of geese
 who can never find their peace,
 whether north or south or west or east"
       --Joanna Newsom

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