[rklaehn]

We decided to keep things simple. In general we try to provide one good way to do something instead of having a lot of options.

E.g. we only provide Ed25519 for keys and in iroh-blobs only BLAKE3 for hashing, instead of having a multihash scheme. Having the public key directly available is sometimes useful, e.g. for verifying signatures. It also allowed us to directly use the mainline extension BEP_0044 to store data for public keys.

That being said, I am very confident that we will be able to provide a relatively smooth transition if we ever have to switch from Ed25519 to another public key format.

For connection encryption we use a TLS extension called raw public keys in TLS, and here of course the keys are prefixed, and we could easily upgrade to another key format and then at some point stop supporting Ed25519 keys.

raw public keys in TLS: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7250 storing arbitrary data in the DHT: https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html