Bitcoin Forum

Some alt coins don't even bother making address validation, which is very irresponsible.

Users can easily send coins to a wrong chain, causing big trouble or even total loss. Case in point:
 
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=180518.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=180518.0)

Bitcoin -- BTE  -- TRC

I wonder if there are others.

DeVCoin deliberately uses addresses that look exactly like BiTCoin addresses, so that people's bitcoin donation addresses can be used to send them devcoins; this lets us assign devcoins to developers without their having to get themselves a specifically devcoin address; they can thus accumulate devcoins sitting at their bitcoin address waiting for them to some day get around to importing the private key of the address into a devcoin wallet to access their coins.

This let us set people up on the recipients lists who maybe to this day might still not have actually set up and run a devcoin client.

-MarkM-

Why including BTE on your list? You can't send BTE to a BTC (or any other) block chain address.

Are you positive on this? I am surprised.

I think having its own address validation should be made as a minimal requirement for any altchain dev.

Thank you for posting this.  This is a pretty serious issue and can really trip newbies up (and the rest of us, as well!).  Over on Terracointalk, there is somebody who accidentally sent 100+ BTC to a BTC-e address, only to discover he was accidentally using a TRC address.  Now he can't seem to get his money recovered from BTC-e (yet).

Anyone having the private key can use ALL the corresponding addresses, whatever the *coin
Resolving this issue just requires either honesty from the receiver or a brain in the sender's head (come on, always double check ffs)

You don't need your own address validation routine, it is already on the main Bitcoin code and with minimal tweak you can adapt it to your chain. Take a look on the base58.h file, the PUBKEY_ADDRESS constant is what rules if an address is compatible with your chain or not. If any other altcoin doesn't change it and has the same Bitcoin address format, then you are right, but that doesn't apply to us. Have you tried sending BTE to a BTC address or vice-versa? You should.

This is the output of the rpc console of the Bytecoin client when you try to send BTE to a BTC address:

If software allows users to make mistake, they will.

Currently we have following address format:
  BTC: 1*
  LTC: L*
  PPC: p*
  Ripple: r*
  FC: 6*
  ...

You can't send coins by mistake when they don't share same address format.

Humans always make mistakes, there's no reason not to implement basic protection for coin users when it's a simple design choice.

Bytecoin addresses start with 8.

Bitcoin also uses the 3* prefix for script hashes.

Yikes... I wonder if that was part of the design  :-\

Yikes... I wonder if that was part of the design  :-\
[/quote]
I doubt it just general laziness.
Just because the coins can be sent there doesn't mean anyone can know the private key to spend them.
Essentially they are lost forever.

The owner of the address on the other network DOES know the private key

As I understand it, it's a feature selected on purpose by TRC developers. They think/thought it good to have only
one address that you can use for both BTC and TRC.