On Thursday, August 19th, 2021 at 1:02 PM, ts via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> > In any case --- the last 5 characters of a bech32 string are already a > > human-readable 5-digit code, with fairly good properties, why is it not > > usable for this case? Side note: it's actually the last six characters. > > Well, because > > a) most people don't know that > > b) it is specific to bech32 > > c) it is not easily readable being the last digits of a long address > (although this could be I think this is a misconception. For the purpose of verifying that you have the *right* address (rather than just a valid one), the checksum, or even the knowledge that a checksum is present, is completely irrelevant. In honestly-generated addresses, every character except the prefix (the ~2 first characters for P2PKH and P2SH, and the ~4 first characters for BIP173/BIP350 native segwit addresses) has exactly the same amount of entropy. Instead of adding say a 4 character code, just tell people to compare any 4 characters of their choosing. Or more - I would hope people are already comparing (much) more than 4 characters already. It doesn't matter if the characters being compared are checksum characters or data characters. In honestly-generated addresses, both are equally random. Adding a special 4 character "external" checksum IMO would instead encourage people to perhaps just compare those 4 characters instead of the rest (or at least, focus mostly on those). That could easily worsen how well comparisons are done in practice... Cheers, -- Pieter _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
