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From: Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>
To: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP-12, 16, 17
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:57:54 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <201201301058.00650.andyparkins@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <B2F57365-3B00-4A0A-B0FC-92B823796F2B@ceptacle.com>

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On 2012 January 28 Saturday, Michael Gronager wrote:

> 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.

I'm throwing this out as an idea; not necessarily saying it's doable or even 
good.

There is spare capacity in the base58 encoding.

 - The address hash is 20 bytes
 - The checksum is 4 bytes
 - The address type is 1 byte
 
The longest and largest address is therefore 25 bytes of 0xff (it's not 
possible to all be 0xff of course).  Converting those 25 bytes of 0xff to 
base58...

 hex:    ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
 base58: 2mXR4oJkmBdJMxhBGQGb96gQ88xUzxLFyG

This is 34 base58 symbols.  It's not the largest base 58 number that will fit 
in 34 symbols though...

 base58: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
 hex:    20a8469deca6b5a6d367cbc0907d07e6a5584778de27ffffffff
 vs hex:   ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

i.e. there are a few unused bits (~5) available in the base58 representation 
that can be added without changing the number of symbols in the address.



Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Parkins
andyparkins@gmail.com

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      reply	other threads:[~2012-01-30 10:58 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 2+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-01-28 10:21 [Bitcoin-development] BIP-12, 16, 17 Michael Gronager
2012-01-30 10:57 ` Andy Parkins [this message]

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