Author: Greg Sanders 2023-01-31 14:30:34
Published on: 2023-01-31T14:30:34+00:00
In a discussion on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, David A. Harding proposed having a reserved address space for future segwit versions that are unlikely to interfere with future soft forks but can still exercise wallets supporting bech32m. He suggested using the following addresses: HRP (Human-readable part) "bc" for mainnet and "tb" for testnet, witness version 16 (the last segwit version), and witness program 0x0000. This would help developers of future soft forks deal with existing outputs paid to templates used in the proposed soft fork. Greg, in response, noted that most exchanges will not enable sends to future segwit versions due to the risk perspective of sending funds there. However, updating to new versions should be straightforward as long as the checksum is not changed again and popular open-source libraries support it. Testing this behavior in production can create an annoyance for developers of future soft forks. Therefore, having a canonical example of future segwit addresses that are unlikely to interfere with future soft forks could be useful.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T04:09:04.372128+00:00