16:03:11 <UkoeHB> moneromooo: do you recall the reason coinbase amounts are committed to with a mask of 1? from this commit https://github.com/monero-project/monero/commit/c3b3260ae5b5acde445fa88a6f0909f582903754
16:04:06 <UkoeHB> The ringct paper says to just use `a H` for coinbase amounts (https://web.getmonero.org/resources/research-lab/pubs/MRL-0005.pdf section 4.2), so I'm wondering where the `1 G + a H` comes from.
16:05:07 <UkoeHB> is it just to avoid the commitment being the identity element?
16:55:21 <moneromooo> UkoeHB: so they can be treated as ringct outputs without further special cases.
16:56:20 <moneromooo> The choice of identity is just to have a canonical simple well known value, it culd have been anything.
16:56:37 <moneromooo> I did not know a MRL paper suggested a particular one.