Replace invalid example address with bip20 address #119

pull evoskuil wants to merge 4 commits into bitcoin:master from evoskuil:master changing 3 files +6 −6

evoskuil commented at 10:24 PM on November 10, 2014: contributor

175tWpb8K1S7NmH4Zx6rewF9WQrcZv245W has an invalid checksum so these example URIs fail on validating parsers
Replace invalid example address with bip21 address cbcded33f3
laanwj commented at 8:02 AM on November 11, 2014: member

Paging @thebluematt as author.

My two cents: There's nothing about address validation in the document. Performing the validation in the document should work fine with a silly example address.

It may even be good to use a bad address, for the same reason that RFCs generally use unroutable IP ranges for examples, namely that people don't accidentally end up using it and (say) flooding someone or in this case sending them coins.
evoskuil commented at 8:06 AM on November 11, 2014: contributor

The document specifies that the value in question be a bitcoin address. While the example is not normative it should at least be representative. It is not a bitcoin address and therefore might as well be anything, making the example fairly pointless, if not counterproductive.
TheBlueMatt commented at 8:13 AM on November 11, 2014: contributor

I dont care either way (the address in question was deliberately bad - it was the one on the wikipedia Bitcoin page, hence the last char was replaced with a W).
evoskuil commented at 8:29 AM on November 11, 2014: contributor

I ran across this issue in using the BIP-21 examples as test vectors and fodder for bx uri-decode documentation. I've done this in a good number of cases and this is the first time I've encountered an invalid example. There are quite a few valid addresses out there that people can accidentally spend money to. If the intent is to provide a guard against accidental spend then I would at least warn people that the address is invalid so that they don't waste time chasing non-existent bugs.

BTW, the comment on my commit should have said that the replacement address was from the BIP-20 example (vs. BIP-21).
evoskuil renamed this:
~~Replace invalid example address with bip21 address~~
Replace invalid example address with bip20 address
on Nov 11, 2014
schildbach commented at 9:05 AM on November 11, 2014: contributor

FWIW, from time to time, a user approaches me with a bug: Bitcoin Wallet does not parse certain bitcoin URIs. It turned out they were trying to use the malformed URIs from this document.
laanwj commented at 9:10 AM on November 11, 2014: member

If you're changing it to a valid address, I'd recomment using a testnet address. Accidentally sending coins is a lot less serious there.
luke-jr commented at 9:29 AM on November 11, 2014: member

Maybe change the label to something else too, if it isn't going to be my address. :p
Stuff working materials into own repo. 2bc526f505
evoskuil force-pushed on Feb 8, 2015
Remove OCSP reference (diagram is PKI-agnostic). 791708e1a4
Add Base58 encoding considerations, consider required MAC, fix typo. fd88af7cbd
laanwj commented at 2:26 PM on March 11, 2015: member

There doesn't seem to be author consensus that changing this is an improvement, so I'm closing this pull.
laanwj closed this on Mar 11, 2015
luke-jr referenced this in commit 4af8e18411 on Jun 6, 2017
JeremyRubin referenced this in commit 1db62a07c5 on Jan 24, 2020
NicolasDorier referenced this in commit 10f6f7d875 on Jan 26, 2020
JeremyRubin referenced this in commit d593a07acc on Jul 14, 2020

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