Author: Mike Hearn
Date: Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 4:48 PM

Ah, of course, that makes sense. 

By the way, if you didn't see it already, there's a discussion on the security of secp256k1 on the forum:

http://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=2699.0

Hal (i presume this is Hal Finney) seems to think the curve is at higher risk of attack than random curves. I guess you chose secp256k1 for the mentioned performance improvement?