[Bitcoin-ml] BitPay's new p2pkh / p2sh address versions and future considerations for Bitcoin Cash addresses

freetrader freetrader at tuta.io
Sat Sep 16 22:26:50 UTC 2017


According to recent BitPay posts [1, 2] which I learned about yesterday, they are adopting a modified address format among other changes such as the 'bitcoincash:' URI prefix.

> To prevent users from unintentionally sending BCH to a BTC wallet or BTC to a BCH wallet, we will use a distinct version byte for BCH addresses. The version byte is set to 28 for p2pkh addresses and 40 for p2sh addresses. 

After looking around a bit, it seems that the p2pkh version value (28) has been used by at least two other coins (CCN = Cannacoin [3] and CDN = Canada e-Coin [4]) before, so it seems the choice might be worth discussing. I did not find the p2sh value (40) used elsewhere, but perhaps I overlooked in my brief search.

It seems to me that proposals such as address version changes should be discussed in this list as they will affect entities in the Bitcoin Cash ecosystem.
While a minimalistic address version change such as BitPay's may be useful as an interim measure, it should be noted that there is work underway on implementing Bech32 address support.
These should perhaps be considered for the additional benefits they bring, if necessarily disruptive address changes are to be made (I do see why address changes would be helpful and regarded as an urgent need by operators).

[1] https://support.bitpay.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004671663
[2] https://blog.bitpay.com/bitcoin-cash-wallet-beta
[3] https://github.com/Cannacoin-Project/Cannacoin/blob/Proof-of-Stake/src/base58.h#L275
[4] https://github.com/Canada-eCoin/Canada-eCoin-qt/blob/master/src/base58.h#L275

Other resources:

- https://github.com/libbitcoin/libbitcoin/wiki/Altcoin-Version-Mappings
- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_address_prefixes

--

freetrader at tuta.io

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