From: William Casarin <jb55@jb55•com>
To: Chris Belcher <belcher@riseup•net>
Cc: Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Base64-encoded descriptors
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2019 12:17:18 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87sgl8mijl.fsf@jb55.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <deb1cedd-ae7d-4ef2-6b89-104183b919b4@riseup.net>
Hey Chris,
Chris Belcher via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org> writes:
> I've recently been playing around with descriptors, and they are very
> nice to work with. They should become the standard for master public
> keys IMO.
>
> One downside is that users cant easily copypaste them to-and-fro to make
> watch-only wallet. The descriptors contain parenthesis and commas which
> stop highlighting by double-clicking. Also the syntax might look scary
> to newbs.
>
> An obvious solution is to base64 encode the descriptors. Then users
> would get a text blog as the master public key without any extra details
> to bother them, and developers can easily base64 decode for developing
> with them.
I don't think encoding descriptors is a good idea. Encoding makes more
sense if it's non-human-readable binary data that you want transfer over
a plaintext channel.
Descriptors aren't binary data, and have a wealth of useful information
that you can view at a glance. Obfuscating this information just to gain
the ability to copy-paste doesn't seem like a good idea.
> I didn't come up with these ideas, they came from discussions with achow101.
I suggested base58 or base62 +hrp for PSBT in id:87zhzlbfq5.fsf@jb55•com
[1] for the reasons that you mentioned, so I'm a bit sad that base64 was
chosen. base64 isn't really good for double-click copy-pasting, it
contains characters such as +/= which aren't always included when
double-clicking. I prefer bech32, base58 or base62. In this case,
encoding of any kind doesn't make much sense IMO.
Cheers,
Will
[1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2018-June/016151.html
--
https://jb55.com
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-12-25 17:24 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-12-24 17:06 Chris Belcher
2019-12-24 19:09 ` Spencer Dupre`
2019-12-25 1:02 ` Trey Del Bonis
2019-12-24 19:25 ` Pavol Rusnak
2019-12-25 17:17 ` William Casarin [this message]
2019-12-26 5:18 ` Andrew Chow
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