Don't most of these coins have a magic number already assigned that is unique? (0xD9B4BEF9 for Bitcoin, 0x0709110B for Testnet, FBC0XB6DB for Litecoin, etc...).  This seems like a good candidate for identifying coins, and also supports Testnet cases well.  Maybe there are some alts without such a magic number that might prevent that?

-Allen


On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 3:09 AM, Tamas Blummer <tamas@bitsofproof.com> wrote:
> A notable suggestion was to instead of building a directory of magic numbers
> (like 0 for Bitcoin, 1 for Litecoin etc) use a hash of the word "Bitcoin",
> "Litecoin", "Dogecoin", so collosion is unlikely and
> cetral directory is not needed.

+1 good idea

--
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/

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