The idea was to use the magic number as the source for cointype.  If it's
too big, as Tamas showed, perhaps a hash of it, and for coins without a
magic number, a hash of their name (or some unique identifier).

That being said, I agree with Andreas that something that is 90%
inter-operable seems very dangerous and will give people false expectations
when they miss the corner cases.  If the structure isn't going to be shared
completely and have all support shared, having it completely incompatible
along with a mechanism for converting part of it to another wallet seems
superior.  The worst types of losses will occur when someone tests out
something with a limited use case, sees that it appears to work, makes
dangerous assumptions, then gets burned when it's too late.

-Allen


On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 11:06 AM, Pavol Rusnak <stick@gk2.sk> wrote:

> On 03/27/2014 04:57 PM, Allen Piscitello wrote:
> > Don't most of these coins have a magic number already assigned that is
> > unique? (0xD9B4BEF9 for Bitcoin, 0x0709110B for Testnet, FBC0XB6DB for
> > Litecoin, etc...).  This seems like a good candidate for identifying
> coins,
> > and also supports Testnet cases well.  Maybe there are some alts without
> > such a magic number that might prevent that?
>
> That magic number is something I find very unfortunate and superflous in
> BIP-32 design. Its only purpose is to distinguish BIP-32 trees for
> various altcoins, but it doesn't make sense at all once you start
> storing various altcoins in the same tree using the proposed
> /m/cointype/reserved'/account'/change/n scheme.
>
> I would love to see that removed from BIP-32 and use always
> 0x0488B21E/0x0488ADE4 (xpub/xpriv), but that is for different discussion
> I guess.
>
> --
> Best Regards / S pozdravom,
>
> Pavol Rusnak <stick@gk2.sk>
>
>
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