Published on: 2011-12-13T15:43:18+00:00
In December 2011, a conversation took place regarding the merging of a change proposed by Matt to address the issue of how people can find out about Bitcoin capabilities. It was noted that expecting people to manually create Bitcoin links would not be practical. Bitcoin-Qt 0.6 introduced a solution with a QR Code generator, but there was disagreement regarding the support for copy/paste and drag/drop functionality in modern operating systems.To solve the problem, an easy-to-use UI using Qt was suggested, which would support copy/paste and drag/drop of rich content. Clicking on a link in the UI would prompt options to drag the link to an email, chat window, or editing program. This idea could be integrated with QR-code generation to add "create a payment link" functionality. Wladimir expressed support for this idea.The discussion also touched upon the use of Base58 encoding in Bitcoin. It was mentioned that Base58 encoding was not chosen for human readability but rather for ease of copy/pasting and hand-writeability. The current method of dragging and dropping the bitcoin: link into the client was discussed, along with a pull request to handle bitcoin: URLs when clicked in the browser. Educating users on this capability was seen as a potential challenge. An idea was proposed to create an easy-to-use UI that allows users to click a "Pay me" button and copy the corresponding HTML content into an email or HTML editor.The concept of the appearance of bitcoin addresses was questioned, with the author suggesting that the focus should be on finishing off URL handling support in the main client for browser integration. This would make it easier for people to create links containing a bitcoin: URL using copy/paste of text/html content.The context also included discussions about proposals to improve the usability and recognizability of addresses through changes in the encoding system. Pieter Wuille proposed using a 20-byte base58 encoding and suggested different versions for various types of addresses. Luke proposed removing the "version" notion from version bytes and changing testnet addresses to improve recognizability, with support from Pieter.The context also mentioned a proposal for creating Bitcoin-compatible Namecoin addresses, defining different bits for network class, network, and data class.Another topic discussed was Sipa's specification for version numbers, which was criticized for overlooking usability in base58 encoding. Luke proposed a new specification that defined network class, network, and data class using different bits, assigning two first-class "networks" besides Bitcoin. Merged mining support was suggested as a requirement, except for networks with a proven-better proof-of-work. Other networks could use the "other" value and a second octet.In summary, the discussions revolved around finding solutions to improve the usability and recognizability of Bitcoin addresses, including the integration of QR code generation, improving URL handling support, and proposing changes to the encoding system. The aim was to make it easier for users to create and interact with Bitcoin links and addresses.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T02:41:47.907651+00:00