Re: [Bitcoin-development] Version bytes "2.0"

[Wladimir <laanwj@gmail.com>]

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All,

I fully agree with Mike Hearn on this. Like email addresses, bank numbers,
phone numbers, IPv4/v6 addresses and such the bitcoin address is just an
opaque identifier for machines to be able to send each other messages.

Base58 was chosen not for human readability but to make it easy to
copy/paste.

Of course, sometimes for security reasons you may want to check the
addresses manually, but it is not the prime usage scenario. Although fun as
a nerd pasttime, I don't think we should encourage "addresses with meaning"
to normal users.

Indeed better to focus on alternative ways that don't involve typing or
even seeing the addresses.

Copy/paste of HTML content is currently not possible. You *can* already
drag&drop the bitcoin: link to the client. Bluematt has a pull request to
automatically handle bitcoin: URLs when clicked in the browser.

Wladimir

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:

> Why does anyone care what an address looks like?
>
> If the user is seeing an address, that's a usability fail right there.
> It's common today because AFAIK nobody finished off the  URL handling
> support in the main client for browser integration. It'd be a much better
> use of time to finish off that integration and make it easy for people to
> create links containing a bitcoin: URL (like with copy/paste of text/html
> content).
>
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