Author: Luke-Jr 2011-12-12 21:02:11
Published on: 2011-12-12T21:02:11+00:00
In December 2011, Pieter Wuille wrote an email discussing the use of base58 for producing human-recognizable addresses. He stated that base58 was not good for this purpose and suggested either dealing with it or completely overhauling it. A proposal was made to use 20-byte base58 for now and overhaul it in the future. The proposed encoding included mainnet pubkey hashes as '1', testnet pubkey hashes as '2' (instead of 111, 'm' and 'n'), mainnet script hashes as '3', and testnet script hashes as '2' (same as normal testnet addresses). For mainnet private keys, the proposal suggested using 'Q', 'R' or 'S' instead of 128 and using '7' instead of 239 for testnet private keys. In Wuille's opinion, since the private keys were 32-byte, there was no reason to follow the 20-byte proposal. Therefore, he suggested leaving the private key encoding alone for now since many services were already using version 128 ('5') for bitcoin private keys and 128 was "reserved" in the 20-byte proposal.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T21:43:57.273600+00:00