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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prev parent 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 Michael Gronager
2012-01-30 10:57 ` Andy Parkins [this message]
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