4 ms·
Not really; both the private key (scalar) and public key (point) are encoded as 32 bytes. However, some implementations concatenate the two and refer to that 64
by nemo1618 5y ago
Not really; both the private key (scalar) and public key (point) are encoded as 32 bytes. However, some implementations concatenate the two and refer to that 64-byte array as the "private key" -- this is simply an optimization so that the pubkey doesn't need to be re-derived each time you want to compute a signature.
- saurik 5y agoThe point was about public keys, not private keys. The answer then is going to sound similar, but is in fact entirely different: the public key is often specified as the X and Y coordinates of the point ("uncompressed"), but only the X coordinate and axis disambiguation is required ("compressed").