Comments on: WARNING: Bitcoins stored in segwit addresses, i.e. addresses that start with a "3" or "bc1" are NOT safe. Please move your coins immediately before a miner "steals" them.

By: whaack

whaack — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 20:41:27 +0000

Indeed, I was confused. The core of my confusion was mixing up terminology. I was describing what is found in the scriptPubkey as the 'address' which is not exactly correct. The discussion where I had this clarified can be found here. This confused terminology usage shows up in the prototype of my block explorer, which must be fixed.

By: Jacob Welsh

Jacob Welsh — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 19:10:57 +0000

That's what I thought you meant, so I'm sticking with "confused" not "confusing". Addresses have version 0 (as implemented), and that version field becomes the first byte in the binary string to be encoded. See also re 'anyonecanspend'.

By: whaack

whaack — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 19:23:12 +0000

@Jacob Welsh

> A technicality perhaps, but this sounds confused. Isn't it the proper p2pkh addresses that start with a zero byte, which translates to 1 in base58 encoding?

Argh yes that is a good point and makes what I'm say confusing. I mean to say that the bitcoin client allows addresses that start with a 0 byte once decoded to be treated as anyone-can-spend. (The base58 p2pkh addresses, once decoded, start with 0x76a914)

And I was unaware that this anyonecanspend idea was not an explicit concept, thank you for that clarification.

By: Jacob Welsh

Jacob Welsh — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 18:31:35 +0000

> contains a rule where outputs that go to an address starting with a "0" byte are treated as anyone-can-spend

A technicality perhaps, but this sounds confused. Isn't it the proper p2pkh addresses that start with a zero byte, which translates to 1 in base58 encoding? And the original bitcoin doesn't have "anyone can spend" as any kind of expressed concept or special rule. You could argue it's latent in the "script" system since it allows creating trivially-true scripts, but that isn't even necessary - simply publishing a private key would have the effect of creating an "anyone can spend" address.

> signpost: contrary to the teachings of mp, declaring victory is not all that is required.

FTR, that doesn't sound like anything I ever heard from MP or saw implicit in his actions. Perhaps it was what certain students wanted to hear. In declarations, as any other text, who's saying it makes all the difference. There's also MP's comment on sitting around thinking you've won as a strategy.