Dear Bitcoiners,

I have been following some of the debate on the various BIP suggestions for 
enabling e.g. multisignature transactions. ( First a little rant - it seems 
like the discussion takes place in at least 5 different forums plus the IRC, 
this is so annoying. Please keep the discussion at one place and refer to this 
for people asking questions other places - including me, now... ).

I have some issues with BIP-16, it is mainly the lines 265-269 in the reference 
implementation 
(https://github.com/gavinandresen/bitcoin-git/blob/pay_to_script_hash/src/base58.h):
 

PUBKEY_ADDRESS = 0,
SCRIPT_ADDRESS = 5,
PUBKEY_ADDRESS_TEST = 111,
SCRIPT_ADDRESS_TEST = 196,

The purpose of the networkID is broken by this, as it ties additional 
information into an address as a hack. In the BIP-12 implementation I argued 
that this notification on address level is not needed, and should not be 
introduced, I am still of the same opinion. The bitcoin code has enough of 
globals and cross references inside the code s it is today, lets not add 
another one...

If we want more information in a bitcoin address we could just as well 
cannibalize it from the checksum - today it is 4 bytes (1 to 4mia) it could be 
2 or 3 bytes (1 to 65k or 16M) and that would not break the current meaning of 
the network ID. This would have the same effect - that you could not mistake 
two different addresses and create a non-redeemable transaction.

The BIP-17 seems a step forward, but I also agree with Gavins note on one on 
the forums, that it behaves differently in input and output scripts. So it 
obviously need some further work too.

Cheers,

Michael
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