Except that (especially when crowded by a number of random characters on each side) "b" can look a LOT like "lo". Even more so with certain typeface selections.
True. I forgot that random letters have a magnetic quality that pulls the two halves of the letter b (but not d) apart, making it confusing like this. And the research probably shows that 1 and l don’t have this problern, loecause they are all one piece. Good call |
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I might take a little liberty here, after running across this: (from https://blockstream.com/team/greg-maxwell ) For many in the Bitcoin community, Greg is likely the person telling you that your protocol is broken and why, but he usually feels pretty bad about it.
I am going to submit that the idea to start introducing Bitcoin addresses that contain both the number 1 and lowercase l together, the majority of the time (71% by my calculation), is broken from a UX perspective. It is as fashionable as tomato soup on a dress shirt. At the risk of sounding redundant, this is a regression from Satoshi that will be observable to the majority of users who ever make use of a bitcoin address. If I ever propose any sort of amendment to BIP 173, it will be to formally suggest the usage of the letter "b" in place of "l", either before this spec gets serious traction for Bitcoin. I would further specify that if not implemented in Bitcoin, it remains a proposed recommendation for alt coin implementers to enjoy a free gimme gift to help differentiate their coin as a superior UX experience that will be salient to even the most casual users. Presumably, B could be said to look like an 8, and that's the only reason I can imagine that "b" is on the list of exclusions. But since the spec strongly encourages the usage of lowercase except where technical constraints dictate otherwise, it would seem like allowing "b" is a far better choice for a spec that clearly spells out visual dissimilarity as a valued attribute in the chosen character selection. What does it take for me to formally propose fixing this and put my OCD-like energy to work improving this here?  |
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. I am sorry that popping up with "constructive criticism" out of the blue without much in the way of reintroduction or community engagement probably seems more confrontational in the absence of regular positive contributions to the project's development. Yes, there certainly was that effect, I was really kind of gut punched by your post and was sort of thinking you'd turned into a bcash shill  -- acknowledging it absolves it. I'm sorry for being a bit quick to judge there. Don't be a stranger. Yeah. It feels to me like that’s what I did and that’s not what I wanted. I am sorry for that. If you can change l to a b, and let the prefix part be valid when capitalized while the data part is lowercase, and maybe put the T in the BC prefix (so as to not encourage 2-letter currency codes), you will have my enthusiasm even if the 1 remains a separator. |
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Having two characters BC represent Bitcoin also feels political, as though it is an effort to pretend that there aren’t alt coins with significant merit.
First, Bitcoin invented this field and if you feel that its natural privileged from doing so is "political" then I really don't see a need to continue discussion with you. If you don't want to put Bitcoin first that's your decision and not something I mind, but don't you dare demand that people who have more or less dedicated their life to it to do worse work on Bitcoin in order to facilitate whatever competing systems that you prefer. What??? Let's not continue discussing it then. I don't own any alt coins other than ones I acquired incidentally, like physical litecoins and some XRP from a giveaway and whatever has been bestowed upon me from forks. I refused all efforts to persuade me to make physical altcoins of any kind. Let's assume my loyalty is to Bitcoin Core and I'm interested in its success. My effort in asking for your attention might make more sense. If you feel you have earned the privilege of shortening the letter T out of BTC to keep it from being worse, then I'm just going to agree with you, because I've done nothing to earn the privilege to be the one who decides which is better or whether to take it out. Secondly, we actually made significant design considerations specifically to facilitate altcoins ... Too bad you're too blinded to see it.
assuming, of course, that I'm an altcoin pusher. If I felt that "BC" was political and I was wrong, then I made a guess and I was wrong. Bitcoin Cash having the same initials is an unfortunate coincidence that might make such a wrong guess seem reasonable. I would have wanted to see BTCxxxx instead of bc1xxxx but it's your proposal and not mine. I am indeed a bit blind, that's why 1 and L's are so problematic for people like me sometimes. on that 1MB of block space
I guess you missed this part of nullius' reply? no, I saw it. He already knows I probably mean with witness data excluded and the difference isn't going to round the current fee back to any level that makes it reasonable to give someone some bitcoin rather than an altcoin to play with or test cryptocurrency for the first time. I am sorry that popping up with "constructive criticism" out of the blue without much in the way of reintroduction or community engagement probably seems more confrontational in the absence of regular positive contributions to the project's development. I'm actually sad because I'm embarrassed to be explaining $30 transaction fees to people and no way to avoid them other than switching to altcoins or trusting in scalability solutions still not ready for prime time, so I'm motivated to show up and whine a little about the factor common to both issues: the plausible appearance of neglect to basic user experience. I accept that the risk with my approach is that my input will likely be completely disregarded, and I appreciate that you've paid what seems like quality attention to what I felt was worth saying. |
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I am inclined to fully cheer many of the improvements. I agree that being able to detect the location of typos is valuable. I just hope we're not losing user friendliness to get this. Having produced tens of thousands of Casascius coins, I don't think there's any question whether I've had experience using Bitcoin addresses, and I confirm I'm human We did, the character set does not include "1", "b", "i", or "o"; which is the unique selection which minimizes the number of visually confusing pairs, at least given the NIST visual confusion data we had available to us at the time. ..-- I find it really disappointing that you wrote this long complaint without knowing even this....
This is true if we're talking about the "data" portion -- the "prefix" portion seems to require a "1" as a separator. What part did I miss that is so disappointing? The casual user is going to just see that 1s and Ls both appear in addresses and, not being a BIP reader, will likely never be aware of the "separator" purpose, nor learn or detect or benefit from figuring out that 1s only appear before a data portion. On the surface, adding this confusing pair looks like a step backwards. If it were me, I'd have allowed the prefix to be opposite cased, e.g. BTCqw508d6qejxtdg4y5r3zarvary0c5xw7kv8f3t4, both adding salience and obviating the need for a separator and making room for the T which I hope wouldn't be confused for currency just by adding a T (how many BTC could this sample test address be confused for in the maximally confusing case? I couldn't tell at a glance). If the 1 and the L could be gotten out of the set of valid characters (to appear anywhere in an address), I'd be far less motivated to put energy into suggesting the human element hasn't been cared for. Couldn't b be put back in its place? Does b really resemble some other character more than L resembles both I and 1 in many common fonts? What font has a b that realistically be confused for another character? |
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I sincerely hope you're right, bring on the Lightning, and I hope it's user friendly and meets the needs of most people, especially non technical people, and minimizes their demand on that 1MB of block space as much as possible.
My Bitcoin Porsche is almost 5 years old and I still thoroughly enjoy driving it. Chocolate cake makes managing my weight a little hard but I'll enjoy that when I can too. My heart will race for Bitcoin Core again when I see a credible solution to this fee problem.
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Objectively, “neurotypical” users will be helped by an error correcting code which permits software to point out to them where they are likely to have made a mistake.
...
As such, I don’t get your comment about altcoins. Bitcoin leads the way here, again.
Neurotypical users will probably applaud having the transaction fees back under $1 before they give accolades for typo correction. Core will lead the way in most efficient usage of pixels in a QR code, while economic forces make winners of the alt coins that don’t charge $30 in fees to do a simple transaction. I wonder what will become of the Core blockchain when the miners defect to a more profitable chain that is still useful for payments and never come back. They won’t come back until it’s profitable but that never happens because no one will buy Core coins while 1MB blocks are hours or days apart with the next difficulty adjustment suddenly becoming months away. In such a scenario no transactions can confirm for anyone besides millionaires insensitive to astronomical fees they’ll pay in the absence of any other choice. And at that point, Bitcoin “led” the way becomes the more popular consensus. |
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“Objective” has the clearest meaning when there is only one single lens to look at things. Personally I prioritize usability for the world population of “neurotypical” users badly needing financial innovation over saving a few CPU cycles or memory bytes or key space in a place users don’t notice. Developers are more likely to prioritize having things fit neatly into binaries. That makes computers and developers happy and sometimes users too. I am pretty comfortable with base32 strings myself with dev experience of my own. But if Bitcoin’s purpose is to be a coin for developers, so that other developers with UX awareness can tell the rest of Bitcoin’s story with their successful alt coins that actually deliver the functional comfortable cryptocurrency experience the world is waiting for, then Bitcoin can claim its rightful chapter in history as a solid success |
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I literally have no “objective” reason (is there truly such a thing?). Just my opinion. Having a code contain 1s and lowercase Ls simultaneously by design is, in my opinion, an obvious UX nightmare that Satoshi did well to explicitly avoid and hardly needed to explain because the potential for confusion requires little such explanation. And the fewer charts you have to memorize to understand cryptocurrency today, the better. Again, my off-the-cuff opinion with zero research referenced because I think this is obvious.
Having two characters BC represent Bitcoin also feels political, as though it is an effort to pretend that there aren’t alt coins with significant merit. If Bitcoin’s contribution to the world is a technical proof of concept of currency on a blockchain with a low priority on user experience so someone else can carry the win across the finish line, so be it — I’ve structured a few projects like that and still considered them valuable successes.
It is not too late to make the prefix 3 characters, the world at large has barely heard of this new address format let alone bought in to it.
I will be happy to use Bech32 if I need to. I am happy it lets me print it in uppercase and that alone solves my issue with L and 1, and I trust that auto-substituting 0 vs O is an auto correction that UIs can safely and easily implement regardless of recommendations. I am satisfied that in the long run, alt coins will satisfy the market demand for a quality user experience if and when the original project fails to. I love Bitcoin (a feeling I will admit I am caught up in) and hate seeing us leave easy-to-solve pain points on the table as opportunities for alt coin teams to look brilliant for fixing.
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I'm writing this here knowing it doesn't belong here (surely some other forum is more proper) but the words are coming to me so here's as good a place as any to draft this.
Bech32, please don't do it as written. At least, please consider the carbon-based units in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Us, like you and me. The ones that provide the emotional component necessary for Bitcoin to succeed. Bitcoin is succeeding not for being technically good alone, it's also got to remain compelling and salient and friendly and intuitive.
Reading about Bech32 leads me to believe that a whole legion of Bitcoiners who scan URI-less QR codes at PAL resolution with VHS cameras and 6502 processors are leading the charge to change Bitcoin so they never have to upgrade past the pre-Internet as they send their Bitcoins off a 64K floppy disk. Everyone I know with a solid grasp of the alphabet is fine with mixed upper and lower case, and every mobile phone that can run a Bitcoin client also scans QR codes much larger than a Bitcoin address, reliably, without exception.
The Base58 pattern with a fixed prefix is very visually distinct and a welcome salience cue for cryptocurrency. Going lower case and totally trashing that visual distinction frustrates us like Coca Cola deciding to change the flavor forever without asking us.
Please save us from having to learn a whole new set of heuristics just to recognize what our string of ASCII-coded binary stands for. The address string with an approximate known length starting with 1 or 3 has worked for us so far. If we have to learn it all over again, can it be something we already know? Why "BC" for Bitcoin? Could we have capital "BTC" or "XBT" followed by mixed case data. Our mobile phones have enough pixels to accommodate this extra character and definitely so do our minds if it can save us from learning not just 3-letter, but now 2-letter acronyms for each cryptocurrency project.
Please give us an encoding that spares us the confusion of having the lowercase letter L and the number 1 all in the same code. I'm sure I will remember whether addresses always contain O's versus zeroes, ones versus L's, but I feel awkward expecting others to. It sounds like "ok, so that's a "B-C-one, but after that first one, addresses never have any more ones, it's always an L after that one one, and we do it this way so it's less confusing".
Please let us keep our mixed case. Trust us, we've got capacity for it, and so do our QR code libraries and our printers and displays. If we're speaking codes the phone, our friends can handle the words "capital" and "lowercase" before each letter just fine. Changing that conversation to "well I think it's an L after the zero, not sure if that's a 1 after an o, where are my glasses, maybe try both? It didn't work?"... I hope it's easy to see how this is actually more frustrating.
Yes, we'd love it if we get error correction just in case we make typos and screw things up. We don't want to send our money to the nether nulls either. It's just, there are other pitfalls impacting our affection and wallets with a much greater damage coefficient than 1 over 4 billion, so changing how addresses look doesn't reassure us or feel like progress, rather how it feels is it steepens our learning curve.
If you let us move forward with you on a new address format, while maintaining our beloved Base58 (our CPU's still love us and are happy with the long division and the extra work parsing the mixed case), could I ask one favor? Would keeping mixed case shorten the code enough to make extra room to pretend (for the sake of error correction) that each character has 64 possible symbols? We could dedicate another character or two to the checksum to make up for it.
If it did, could we pretty-please have "Bech58" that maintains our mixed case look? 58 is not a round square number, but we're Bitcoin, we have our style, and we have a few billion in market cap to be able to afford a few CPU cycles to make our b-58 shine and make people think of their one and only true love of Bitcoin (or at least about money) when they see beautiful mixed base58 as a string.
Pieter and Greg, I know you'll settle for no less than a perfect Bitcoin improvement proposal and you have my respect. Thanks for listening.
Can someone who knows better than me where a plea like this belongs, either copy it there or link to it here from there? Thanks
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Thumbs up |
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The current problem is that Otoh and LesbianCow know about this auction which means I have little chance of getting it, let alone a great deal. I agree on this ^^^ I expect a flurry of last second/millisecond bids  Last time I dealt with this by stating that any bid automatically extends the auction to x minutes after the last bid it looks like I'm able to edit my message in this thread as well. an auction thread might not work right if editing is allowed (isn't there a subforum or an option to disable editing/deleting for auction threads? maybe a mod can set it on the thread? etc.) |
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 May 2, 2017 re: escrow 25BTC Casascius coin for Shawn Shira Hi, the sentiment that I don't normally offer escrow services is correct, but I've known Shawn 15+ years and will be happy to do this. Portion of a valid Bitcoin address for me that I've reserved for this transaction: 18HUZvyDQskjC......Dmh3WyHzMu9mH Or I'm happy to be 1 party of a 2-of-3 multisig wallet using CoPay. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: GPGTools - https://gpgtools.orgiQEcBAEBCgAGBQJZCSUKAAoJEFou6PHxF1ojPOMH/0V/ucf2wBQO5px+SqC3D3Hx LR2lKioFYXXwqzFpjw3BR8RQgF3p3xXn4Ny3FXieQh3b6Yb0oD0fmjAWEa/sQqCx RKFnyNthaqJipqdNszRhaasBz3umzodaF2Nd9EgE+eVKHx5smBWAAixmE8cU2NKl eDmvI/88KX3v3sJpqMd/13urfe032zAXtWx9Gnus+mgziW/TK+IZd8EUWhS/Zzim IK/O/vetGfb8d3US0iA+QRj+gc015XKEDoEEfRyF/hW6jXilIpNKsk3QStFH7DTA cJRblcsrY3mure83q1oz+dG/XwhUDiUuJ3Fnxpirxdc1CC2rprEFCHPDOK3O3uM= =mb/X -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- |
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Hi, stopping by on a random visit to the forum.
Coblee's gold 1000 BTC Casascius coins are legit. They are 2factor. I sold them to him when we met up in San Jose for one of the earliest Bitcoin conferences (I'd like to say May 2013)? Without looking at my records, my eyeball's recollection was 20 to 30 coins. He got the single largest delivery of the gold blanks that I had made up in the first place, and in exchange, I got a ride in his tesla (and some random looking digits added to this blockchain thing out there on the interwebs). I just didn't sell very many of the completed coin at the premium price I was asking, and the more 1000 BTC became worth, the more even trusting ("testing") the 2factor system for the 1st time with your hard mined 1000 BTC becomes a heartstopping leap of faith. So that's why I made them available that way to Coblee. I am pretty sure I made no more than 50 of the gold coins.
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I confirm I received my book!
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@casascius - do you happen to know who is behind this website/venture? I am curious to know if the person behind the book is reputable enough to be sure this is legit.
Not personally - but I ordered the book and will let you know if I get what I was promised! Chasing yourself now, Casascius? How much was it? I don't want to put in my street address just to find the price  IIRC pricey for a book - like $150 (?) That said, I won't be shocked if he still sells the whole run! |
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@casascius - do you happen to know who is behind this website/venture? I am curious to know if the person behind the book is reputable enough to be sure this is legit.
Not personally - but I ordered the book and will let you know if I get what I was promised! I have every reason to believe it's legit - who'd go to all the trouble of this photoshoot only to renege on the promise of delivering them in print?  |
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Yeah, I am merely passing this along. I have not responded to anyone.
Is this bar still for sale ? To the best of my knowledge, probably yes! |
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Yeah, I am merely passing this along. I have not responded to anyone.
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