Atheros, the lead developer of Bitmessage, has made a request for feedback from the crypto community on possible new feature first suggested by Greg Maxwell: https://bitmessage.org/forum/index.php?topic=4170.0

The feature in question is adding support for Bitmessage addresses which, rather than containing the hash of two EC public keys as is the case now, contain a single compressed EC public key. This would allow for greater resilience against traffic analysis, because it would remove the need to request the full public keys of an address before sending a message to it and the need for the receiving node to respond to such requests.

Greg Maxwell's proposal was originally discussed in these posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitmessage/comments/1ay3kh/why_not_use_the_public_key_directly/

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitmessage/comments/1kc03b/please_support_nonhashed_addresses/

The main point that Atheros is asking for feedback on is whether there is any downside to using the same EC key for both ECDSA and ECIES (signing and encryption).

Any input from the Bitcoin community would be very much appreciated!