Author: Wladimir 2013-06-11 13:44:39
Published on: 2013-06-11T13:44:39+00:00
In an IRC conversation, there was some confusion regarding whether bitcoin addresses are opaque or not. The term 'opaque' means that one cannot tell anything about the address by examining the characters. Although from a human's perspective, bitcoin addresses appear to be opaque since they don't reveal any information about geographical location, bank details or personal identity. However, from a code perspective, they have a meaning i.e. "address type + hashed public key, base58 encoded." Despite this, it can still be argued that the value remains very opaque.There was also a discussion on the possible change in base58 encoding, but it was established that there had been no changes to it. Satoshi coined the term and the encoding is still the same as it was before.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T18:49:05.985072+00:00