Amaury Séchet Proposes New Bitcoin Cash Address Format for January 14

This week, the lead developer for Bitcoin ABC, Amaury Séchet, sent out a proposal via the developer’s mailing list to upgrade the address format for the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network. Séchet says the need to change the address format is “pressing” and the developer suggests aiming for deployment around January 14, 2018.

Bitcoin ABC Developer Amaury Séchet Proposes New Bitcoin Cash Address Format

Back in October, news.Bitcoin.com reported on BCH developers discussing a change to the network’s current address format. Right now, there have been issues with people sending BCH to BTC addresses or vice versa; making the mistakenly sent funds unspendable. Bitcoin ABC’s lead developer, Amaury Séchet, has announced proposing to fix this problem after the new year with a new address format called the “Cashaddr format.” The protocol is based on work designed by Rusty Russel – who helped configure the format from a codebase called “bech32,” proposed by bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille.

“Bitcoin Cash has been in need for a new address format for quite some time — There is an immediate problem as people mistakenly send BCH to BTC address and vice versa, which is made worse by the fact that Segwit on the BTC chain had the brilliant idea to leverage outputs that anyone can spend, which make the recovery of the funds delicate on the Bitcoin Cash chain,” Séchet’s proposal explains.

While the problem of funds sent on the wrong chain is pressing, there are other reasons we need to update the address format. It is imperative that the chosen standard for Bitcoin Cash address the various issues present in the current address format as we cannot change addresses every other Tuesday.

For more details, please visit: https://news.bitcoin.com/amaury-sechet-proposes-bitcoin-cash-address-change-for-january-14/?utm_source=OneSignal%20Push&utm_medium=notification&utm_campaign=Push%20Notifications