In the numerous discussions I'm having pretty much every day about crypto currencies and their (future) widespread adoption, some problems keep popping up repeatedly, sometimes including possible solutions. I want to use this series of posts to keep track of those and put them on the blockchain so they can never be forgotten ;-)

As you can take from the title, this is not about revolutionizing cryptos, but about small, incremental improvements which can make cryptos easier to understand, use, trade, invest or whatever for potentially everyone.

As usual, I'm happy to discuss alternatives or more advanced options in the comments.

Problem: Wrong address

I don't know whether you have the same feeling whenever you transfer larger amounts of crypto to a different address - you keep triple- and quadruple-checking the target address, account ID or whatever you may need, depending on the crypto asset. After all, you know that if you get it wrong, your money will be lost forever.

How is this different from bank transfers?

Of course, there is a similar problem with bank transfers or similar fiat-based transaction mechanisms. Many people don't even know that the name of the recipient typically is not validated for bank transfers or credit card transactions, so they need to be validated by their number / ID only. So actually, there is a similar problem for bank transfers and banks show a confirmation page to check the transaction before actually submitting it. In addition, banks and other financial institutions use checksums to validate whether an address could be correct:

• For IBANs it's the third and forth digit
• For credit cards, it's the last digit

Transfers in cryptos

Crypto transactions are actually worse as they may consist of multiple pieces of information (e.g. in Ripple or Stellar) or simply consist of really long addresses which are almost impossible to check and sometimes may cause problems with lower- and uppercase letters (which cannot happen with IBAN). In addition, some wallets would offer input fields which are too short for the whole address to fit in. E.g., let's have a look at IOTA withdrawals on Bitfinex:

You would basically check the first few and the last few characters of the address upon the confirmation to make sure that everything has been copied. However, if for any reason you've accidently deleted a character in the middle of the address string, good luck finding that one.

Suggestion: Checksums

It would actually be nice to have a standard for 2- to 3-digit checksums (similar to the credit card CVC) that would be given to you by the recipient of the transaction to validate whether you've copy&pasted their address correctly. You would see immediately in case something was wrong, and it would reduce the amount of sweat on your hands to have a simple method of checking.

Do you have a similar feeling when making crypto transfers? What do you think about checksums for addresses? Any other suggestions?