Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Bitcoin Technical Support => Topic started by: johnscoin on June 24, 2017, 08:46:03 AM



Title: Why SW addresses start with BC1? Instead of B1 or BTC1?
Post by: johnscoin on June 24, 2017, 08:46:03 AM
I have searched a lot, and could not find any reasonable explanation.

As for me, "BC1" would be much more anti-intuition and less user-friendly than "B1" or "BTC1".

Is there any technical reason behind Core's decision that we must use "BC1" SW addresses?


Title: Re: Why SW addresses start with BC1? Instead of B1 or BTC1?
Post by: achow101 on June 24, 2017, 04:07:28 PM
First of all, this is not "Core's decision". Bech32 was not created by "Core" and has not yet been adopted and implemented by the other developers of Core. It is the proposal of a few people who work on Core but they are not and do not represent Core.

This is all explained in the BIP here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0173.mediawiki#rationale
Quote
Why use 'bc' as human-readable part and not 'btc'? 'bc' is shorter.


Title: Re: Why SW addresses start with BC1? Instead of B1 or BTC1?
Post by: johnscoin on June 25, 2017, 02:47:51 AM
First of all, this is not "Core's decision". Bech32 was not created by "Core" and has not yet been adopted and implemented by the other developers of Core. It is the proposal of a few people who work on Core but they are not and do not represent Core.

This is all explained in the BIP here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0173.mediawiki#rationale
Quote
Why use 'bc' as human-readable part and not 'btc'? 'bc' is shorter.

I have read that explanation before. So that's exactly my question. Now that "B1" is even shorter and distinguishable, why they chose "BC1“? Was there any technical reason? I read that BIP again and could not find any other explanation.

BTW, now that that BIP was proposed by Blockstream, it's extremely likely that it will gain "consensus", sooner or later. However, the blockstream-style logic always sounds weird to me.