Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] A BIP proposal for segwit addresses

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 7 May 2017 18:34:29 -0400

On Sun, May 07, 2017 at 02:39:14PM -0700, Pieter Wuille via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > I don't understand your comment about non-english speaking users.
> Obviously they cannot voice-communicate at all with only-english-speaking
> users, so there is no need to communicate voice-communicate addresses
> between them.
> 
> I assume that Peter Todd is talking about cases where English speakers are
> interacting with non-native English speakers, who may know how to pronounce
> numbers or alphabetical characters, but not all special characters.

Exactly - knowledge of the English language isn't a binary. Equally, I don't
remember ever learning names of special characters in French class back in
elementary school, but I do recall us drilling the alphabet and especially
numbers repeatedly.

If I were trying to tell a French speaker a BTC address, I'd probably be able
to succesfully do it with bech32, but not with any encoding using special
characters.

> In general:
> 
> In the past weeks people have contributed two new reference implementations
> (Haskell and Rust), and a C++ and Go one are underway (see
> https://github.com/sipa/bech32).

FWIW, I also did a partial rust implementation of just the Bech32 encoding for
a prototype non-BTC use-case. Other than the version number being it's own
"chunk" I found it very straight-forward to implement and I think it'll make
for a nice replacement for what otherwise would have been hex digests.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org