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 andypark...@gmail.com
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