Using squares, circles and triangles with colours to represent bitcoin addresses

[arklan]

one word: colorblind. i promise you all this looks quite different to my screwy eyes then to others.

[1715575342]

1715575342

[1715575342]

1715575342

[1715575342]

1715575342

[1715575342]

1715575342

[1715575342]

1715575342

[mskwik]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon



generator: http://finalboss.org/g/

Identicons for bitcoin addresses have been discussed before:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=122240.0

In short it works fairly well as an extra checksum but it has much less entropy than the full address so matching the first few address characters and the icon is not that hard.  It depends on your use case how useful it really is, it can help with easily identifying mistyping of addresses (but so can the built-in checksum), but doesn't necessarily prevent spoofing one address with another similar one.

[rini17]

I prefer unicorns! Bitcoin addresses are supported too, not just email (but not whole address fits the input).

[K1773R]

I prefer unicorns! Bitcoin addresses are supported too, not just email (but not whole address fits the input).

u can pass it to the API (just read trough it), so it fits

[constitution]

Interesting Idea, but I honestly dont see this being accepted by the community.

[jl2012]

How about people with color blindness?

[Ente]

How about people with color blindness?

one word: colorblind. i promise you all this looks quite different to my screwy eyes then to others.

Thank you for reminding us.
I would suggest a two-fold way:

Display some graphical representation of the address, any of the ones posted will do (as long as it works offline too!). As this has both color and symbol/pattern in it, even "colorblind" people would see a difference in many cases.

Display the first 4 and last 4 letters of the address too. This both helps "colorblind" folks as well as make (close) collisions of the graphic less likely. Depending on the graphical keyspace it could be too easy to generate the whole set once for addresses the attacker controls, and then replace the valid one with one which has the same or similar symbol. This might not be possible with 8 additional digits per symbol, but I didn't calculate through it..

Ente

[Red Emerald]

I don't see inventing a new alphabet doing much to make copying addresses easier.

I like the idea of identicons as an additional checksum. I'm color blind too and think that they still work plenty well for that.

[Ente]

I don't see inventing a new alphabet doing much to make copying addresses easier.

I like the idea of identicons as an additional checksum. I'm color blind too and think that they still work plenty well for that.

..for copying addresses? Nah, we still need nfc/usb/qr for that!
These *icons are for visual, human-readable checksum only!

Ente

[herzmeister]

How about people with color blindness?

one word: colorblind. i promise you all this looks quite different to my screwy eyes then to others.

Thank you for reminding us.

Maybe use black, darker blue, dark green, normal red, light yellow so that also the colorblind easily can identify the difference.