I am inclined to fully cheer many of the improvements. I agree that being able to detect the location of typos is valuable. I just hope we're not losing user friendliness to get this.
Having produced tens of thousands of Casascius coins, I don't think there's any question whether I've had experience using Bitcoin addresses, and I confirm I'm human
This is true if we're talking about the "data" portion -- the "prefix" portion seems to require a "1" as a separator. What part did I miss that is so disappointing? The casual user is going to just see that 1s and Ls both appear in addresses and, not being a BIP reader, will likely never be aware of the "separator" purpose, nor learn or detect or benefit from figuring out that 1s only appear before a data portion. On the surface, adding this confusing pair looks like a step backwards.
If it were me, I'd have allowed the prefix to be opposite cased, e.g. BTCqw508d6qejxtdg4y5r3zarvary0c5xw7kv8f3t4, both adding salience and obviating the need for a separator and making room for the T which I hope wouldn't be confused for currency just by adding a T (how many BTC could this sample test address be confused for in the maximally confusing case? I couldn't tell at a glance).
If the 1 and the L could be gotten out of the set of valid characters (to appear anywhere in an address), I'd be far less motivated to put energy into suggesting the human element hasn't been cared for. Couldn't b be put back in its place? Does b really resemble some other character more than L resembles both I and 1 in many common fonts? What font has a b that realistically be confused for another character?
Having produced tens of thousands of Casascius coins, I don't think there's any question whether I've had experience using Bitcoin addresses, and I confirm I'm human
We did, the character set does not include "1", "b", "i", or "o"; which is the unique selection which minimizes the number of visually confusing pairs, at least given the NIST visual confusion data we had available to us at the time. ..-- I find it really disappointing that you wrote this long complaint without knowing even this....
This is true if we're talking about the "data" portion -- the "prefix" portion seems to require a "1" as a separator. What part did I miss that is so disappointing? The casual user is going to just see that 1s and Ls both appear in addresses and, not being a BIP reader, will likely never be aware of the "separator" purpose, nor learn or detect or benefit from figuring out that 1s only appear before a data portion. On the surface, adding this confusing pair looks like a step backwards.
If it were me, I'd have allowed the prefix to be opposite cased, e.g. BTCqw508d6qejxtdg4y5r3zarvary0c5xw7kv8f3t4, both adding salience and obviating the need for a separator and making room for the T
which I hope wouldn't be confused for currency just by adding a T (how many BTC could this sample test address be confused for in the maximally confusing case? I couldn't tell at a glance).If the 1 and the L could be gotten out of the set of valid characters (to appear anywhere in an address), I'd be far less motivated to put energy into suggesting the human element hasn't been cared for. Couldn't b be put back in its place? Does b really resemble some other character more than L resembles both I and 1 in many common fonts? What font has a b that realistically be confused for another character?