On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 3:11 PM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarva...@gmail.com> wrote: > There was some confusion on IRC as to whether bitcoin addresses are opaque > or not. > > https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address > > For the sake of argument let's say that opaque means that you can tell > nothing about the address by examining the characters. > > My understanding was that they are NOT opaque, and that if that has changed, > it will invalidate much at least some wiki page, for examples at least some > of the following would now be false:
I'm afraid this is the result of a misunderstanding. Yesterday on IRC you were asking why the URI specification doesn't include the semantics and encoding of addresses. Some people, including me, argued that addresses should be considered opaque. That doesn't mean they don't have well-specified definition, only that for the purposes of URI parsing and handling, code shouldn't know or care what they represent or how they are formatted. Addresses are specified in one place, and the URI format simply passes addresses through. The reason for keeping them independent is that the address format could change (say, a new type is added, like P2SH (BIP13) before), and there is no reason why this should break or even concern URI handling code. Clearly, anything that actually interprets addresses in order to construct transactions will need changing. It's just two separate concerns, and they should be dealt with separately. -- Pieter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
