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From: Michael Gronager <gronager@ceptacle.com>
To: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: [Bitcoin-development] BIP-12, 16, 17
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 11:21:19 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <B2F57365-3B00-4A0A-B0FC-92B823796F2B@ceptacle.com> (raw)

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


             reply	other threads:[~2012-01-28 10:38 UTC|newest]

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

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