Rather than using an inhumanly long hex string from the genesis hash to distinguish between mainnet and testnet, why not use the network magic bytes instead? Much shorter, just as distinct.

I'd still prefer a common network name mapping for the sake of humanity. Few bitcoin library implementations use the same string names for mainnet and testnet. This BIP could simply define one string name alias for each supported network and leave mapping to local lingo to the implementors.

-Danny

On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 1:10 PM, Jorge Timón <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 9:01 PM, Matt Whitlock via bitcoin-dev
<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> That's still not right, since "mainnet" and "testnet" are not host names.
>
> You'd have to do something like:
>
> blockchain:?network=testnet&txid=3b95a766d7a99b87188d6875c8484cb2b310b78459b7816d4dfc3f0f7e04281a

I would really prefer chain=<chainID> over network=<chainPetnameStr>
By chainID I mean the hash of the genesis block, see
https://github.com/jtimon/bitcoin/commit/3191d5e8e75687a27cf466b7a4c70bdc04809d39
I'm completely fine with doing that using an optional parameter (for
backwards compatibility).

I agree with Andreas Schildbach that respecting the most commonly used
schemes is desirable.
So my preference would be:

/tx/3b95a766d7a99b87188d6875c8484cb2b310b78459b7816d4dfc3f0f7e04281a?chain=000000000933ea01ad0ee984209779baaec3ced90fa3f408719526f8d77f4943

(a tx in testnet)

/block/00000000000000000b0d504d142ac8bdd1a2721d19f423a8146d0d6de882167b?chain=000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f

(a block in bitcoin's mainnet)
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