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Title: Too many characters? Post by: steelboy on March 26, 2013, 08:56:02 AM This may have a really simple answer but why if the first 8 characters of the btc address are all unique do they need the other ones. ???
Title: Re: Too many characters? Post by: Lethn on March 26, 2013, 10:36:29 AM It's a bit like I.P addresses you need that many because what receive addresses are are a bit like I.P addresses themselves except they're used for sending and receiving Bitcoins, if you only have 2 characters then you'd barely be able to get 5000+ people using the network. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future the devs had to had more characters if Bitcoin got even more popular but I'm no programmer so I couldn't really comment :)
Title: Re: Too many characters? Post by: Stephen Gornick on March 26, 2013, 11:48:47 AM This may have a really simple answer but why if the first 8 characters of the btc address are all unique do they need the other ones. ??? The first 8 characters are not "all unique", they just happen to be "unique enough" that it is extremely unlikely to ever have a collision. Now Firstbits are different as they can be tied to a Bitcoin address because of the order they have been seen in the blockchain. For instance, the Firstbits "1" will uniquely identify the first Bitcoin address that starts with a 1 -- which happen to be the Bitcoin address for the generated coin in the genesis block. Every other Bitcoin address also starts with a 1, except the fist one in block 0 is the only one with a Firstbits of "1". |