Author: Pieter Wuille 2013-06-11 14:12:52
Published on: 2013-06-11T14:12:52+00:00
On June 11, 2013, Melvin Carvalho raised a question on IRC regarding the opacity of Bitcoin addresses. He defined opaque as being unable to determine anything about an address by examining its characters. However, this led to a misunderstanding. The previous day on IRC, there was a discussion about why the URI specification does not include the semantics and encoding of addresses. Some participants, including Pieter, argued that addresses should be considered opaque. This meant that for the purposes of URI parsing and handling, code shouldn't know or care what they represent or how they are formatted. It is important to note that addresses do have well-defined specifications; however, keeping them independent from URIs allows for the possibility of changes in the address format without breaking or concerning URI handling code. For instance, a new type like P2SH (BIP13) could be added without affecting URI handling code. However, anything that interprets addresses to construct transactions would need to be changed. It is essential to deal with these two concerns separately.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:01:47.803804+00:00