Progress on bech32 for future Segwit Versions (BIP-173)



Summary:

Pieter proposed an alternative to length restrictions suggested by Russell in a GitHub pull request. He suggests using a variant proposed by Sipa unless the first byte is 0. Pieter also discusses the introduction of a new checksum scheme and the importance of considering its error detection capabilities. He notes that it's possible to take a new-style address with a constant M=0x3FFFFFFF, make 3 substitution errors, and obtain an old-style address. Furthermore, inserting/deleting errors can be restricted to patterns that require 6 fixed characters, which implies a probability of 2^-30 assuming uniformly random characters. Pieter suggests that M=0x3ffeffff has both these properties. He plans to do more analysis and update his gist. Overall, Pieter's proposal seems to be a better choice for the new checksum scheme.


Updated on: 2023-05-20T23:58:12.040639+00:00