Hi,

In my original post, I said:


Maybe cemented is not the most precise word here. A block with more than 6 confirmations is generally considered safe enough so your money isn't going anywhere you don't intend. As long as the implementation doesn't let you refer to a block with fewer than 6 confirmations, you should be safe (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Confirmation).

But you can easily wait -let's say 12- confirmations or more to get additional safety. Waiting for 24 hours will give you around 144 blocks on top of yours. One has to be really paranoid to go any further; but it is your money. Wait as long as you want to feel safe.

In addition to that, the CRC-16 part of the easy address format (the last number) means that you have a probability of a collision of 1/2^16 (0.0000152587890625). And this is just a rough idea. Instead of using CRC-16 you could take the last n-bits of a Hash, thus getting a higher protection (20 bits gives you a chance of about 1 in a million of a collision, and can be expressed with <=5 decimal digits most of the time). So even if you mistype the address or there is a fork, there is very little chance of losing any money. Using the amount transferred to the 'anchor' transaction (see my example of the house sale in a previous answer) will grant you an even higher degree of confidence that you are sending your money to the right destination.

On the other hand, upon a second reading of your comment I think maybe we have a bit of a missunderstanding here.

When you say:

  maybe you are in the belief that I am proposing recording addresses on the blockchain in this format, which I am absolutely not.

I am just proposing an additional way to express a payment destination, that is easier and safer for certain payments.

In the end, your wallet will retrieve and use the underlying bitcoin address (that is the Hash-160 of your public key). There is NO change at all in the bitcoin blockchain.