Bech32 weakness and impact on bip-taproot addresses



Summary:

A proposal has been made by Russell O'Connor to length-prefix the witness program. He noted that the 1 byte witness version is essentially a 1 character witness version, leaving 15 unused characters in the bech32 alphabet. Therefore, he proposed creating a new human-readable-prefix for length-prefixed bitcoin witness programs, suggesting "btc1" as a possible prefix. In another email, ZmnSCPxj proposed modifying the Bech32 SegWit address format for version 1 and above, while retaining the ability of a bech32 address to specify any valid witness length and allowing future version 1 addresses with lengths other than 32. However, this proposal was deemed ridiculous and not practical.


Updated on: 2023-06-13T22:08:00.925757+00:00