[Bitcoin-ml] Upgrading CashAddr in order to improve user experience

fathi abdoon fathiabdoon at gmail.com
Fri Feb 23 22:15:27 UTC 2018


I would like to add my 2 cents in to this discussion. Addresses should not
be manually typed. And if they are then they should not be encouraged.
This is in part to avoid mistakes and / or loss of funds. The checksum
surely will help prevent mistakes.

I think it's really important to start thinking of providing a service that
will be as easy as possible to use.
Scanning a barcode, copy pasting an address, or a futuristic undiscovered
clever simple UX way. End goal is to make it easy.

We have cashAddr that we can live with for now and that should be it for
now. We should move forward and think of other improvements and not recycle
old ones.
You should keep in mind that it took time for merchants to implement cashAddr
even though there are still some that haven't yet.

On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 4:12 PM, Lucas Clemente Vella via bitcoin-ml <
bitcoin-ml at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> I agree it is an expensive change, but it is a backward compatible
> change that is useful in case users needs to type or write down an
> address.
>
> I dare say a situation where some wallets do support CashAddr 1.0 and
> others support CashAddr 1.1 is no worse than everybody supporting just
> 1.0, but almost certainly better.
>
> Can I think of very specific situations where the same address working
> on some wallets and don't working on others would cause a problem?
> Yes, I can. But given the fact that such address would most certainly
> come from a misread (as you said, copy-pasting and QR code scanning
> isn't affected), the user would already have a problem, anyway.
>
> For completeness, the link to the discussion were users argues
> CashAddr is harming UX:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7zm1m1/psa_the_new_
> address_format_added_ambiguous/?st=je0dezmp&sh=3fa86513
>
> 2018-02-23 16:10 GMT-03:00 Matias Alejo Garcia <ematiu at gmail.com>:
> > Please note that copy-pasting an address or QR scanning it is not
> affected
> > by this issue.  Also, note that cashaddr has a (strong) checksum that
> would
> > prevent this issue: if the user types it wrong; or if a malware modifies
> it,
> > the checksum will not verify).
> >
> > I'm afraid the change you propose is not minor, because it will need to
> be
> > implemented, in a coordinated way, by every wallet, exchange, etc that
> > currently use cashaddr.
> >
> > On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 12:30 PM, Lucas Clemente Vella via bitcoin-ml
> > <bitcoin-ml at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> One user complained on Reddit that the new CashAddr that it is
> >> ambiguous, because lowcase 'L' looks like '1' and uppercase 'i'. I
> >> dare say there is the same problem with 'o' and '0'. It is a problem
> >> because most users won't bother to know what characters comprises the
> >> base32 encoding.
> >>
> >> My proposed solution is simple: treat 'i', 'L' and '1' as the same
> >> encoded value of 31 when parsing input, but always record and display
> >> as 'L' (use lowercase or uppercase as recommended).
> >>
> >> Same thing with 'o' and '0': treat both as the same character with
> >> encoded value of 15 when parsing, but always display 0.
> >>
> >> We can make the adjustment in CashAddr spec and bump the version to 1.1.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Lucas Clemente Vella
> >> lvella at gmail.com
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> bitcoin-ml mailing list
> >> bitcoin-ml at lists.linuxfoundation.org
> >> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-ml
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Matías Alejo Garcia
> > @ematiu
> > Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads!
>
>
>
> --
> Lucas Clemente Vella
> lvella at gmail.com
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-ml mailing list
> bitcoin-ml at lists.linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-ml
>
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