Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] A BIP proposal for conveniently referring to confirmed transactions

From: Tom Zander <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2017 15:40:29 +0200

On Friday, 14 July 2017 20:43:37 CEST Clark Moody via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> I can understand the desire to keep all reference strings to the nice
> 14-character version by keeping the data payload to 40 bits

I’m not so clear on this, to be honest.

What is the point of having a user-readable tx-reference?

In the actual blockchain you will still be using txid, and if you want to 
change that then a less readable but more compact format is useful because 
we want to optimize for space, not for human comprehention.

Another usecase I can come up with is you wanting to spend a specific output, 
or you reporting a specific tx as proof to a merchant (or tax office).

For any such usecases you sill need to actually provide a proof of holding 
the private keys and using a human-readable format just doesn’t seem to make 
much sense because a cryptographic proof of ownership is not going to be 
readable however hard you try.

Apologies for missing the point,
can you list one or two usecases that you can see this being used for?
-- 
Tom Zander
Blog: https://zander.github.io
Vlog: https://vimeo.com/channels/tomscryptochannel