Author: Gregory Maxwell 2018-01-06 00:44:20
Published on: 2018-01-06T00:44:20+00:00
In a recent email to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Luke Dashjr brought up the previously discussed P2SH² improvements and questioned why they were not included in Bech32. P2SH² involves having the address include the single SHA256 hash of the public key or script, instead of RIPEMD160(SHA256(pubkey)) or SHA256(SHA256(script)). The sender would perform the second hash to produce the output, which would enable relaying the middle-hash as a way to prove the final hash is in fact a hash itself, thereby proving it is not embedded data spam.However, according to Luke Dashjr, P2SH² wasn't a serious proposal and he suggested it as a thought experiment. He doesn't believe it offers much value for Bitcoin today, especially since weight calculations have made output space relatively more expensive and fees are at non-negligible rates. Additionally, people already rushed to market with Bech32 in advance of practically any public review.Luke Dashjr believes that adding more address diversity at this time wouldn't be good for the ecosystem. Instead, he suggests considering working on an address-next proposal that has an explicit timeframe of N years out, and very loud don't deploy this. Layered hashing is just one minor slightly nice-to-have feature, and other features such as coded expiration times and abilities to have amounts under checksum are probably more worth consideration.
Updated on: 2023-05-20T04:37:30.852606+00:00