Author: Peter Todd 2017-09-29 01:50:48
Published on: 2017-09-29T01:50:48+00:00
In a recent email exchange on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Gregory Maxwell and Peter Todd discussed the issue of address reuse. They agreed that reusing old addresses is a major problem for both privacy and operational reasons. However, they also discussed how difficult it would be to add features like dates and explicit amounts to address formats without retarding adoption due to debating over the encodings and different software requirements. Additionally, they noted that even something as simple as adding a new type of confirmation window could be a big change to UI logic. While they supported the idea of adding these features, they felt it was too late in the process to change the current BIP173 format which has already been deployed. They discussed the possibility of using 1 bit to indicate an embedded amount and 19 bits of 1 day precision in address format linked fields, resulting in a 1435 year span, but acknowledged that high precision expiration times might not be useful due to clock skew. They agreed that users should see a resolution more precise than what they expect timeouts to be set at to avoid UI "fencepost" oddity.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T19:09:04.271267+00:00