waxwing on Nostr: I found myself pondering about malleability: it's just a posh word for ...

I found myself pondering about malleability: it's just a posh word for "change(ability)", see variants "malleable", "malleate". More malleability is more power but also more danger. Pushing analogies to their extreme, consider the difference between pure gold and alloyed gold. Pure gold is perfectly resistant to corrosion but being extremely malleable, is useless for building strong structures. In a similar way, cryptographic constructs that are naively built with very powerful primitives (like schnorr signatures) that are easily malleated can lead to useful outcomes (adaptors) and highly dangerous ones (naive MuSig). So-called "textbook RSA" is also like this (here's a good explanation: https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/1448/definition-of-textbook-rsa ).