Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Password-protected private key export format
by
samr7
on 10/08/2011, 19:54:41 UTC
Hm, in this case the overall length isn't as important as having visual breaks. Think about the way Microsoft prints its product keys that people have to type in to activate Windows.

This is a very good point.  Segmentation like this is something that regular bitcoin addresses could benefit from as well -- typing in 34 characters is difficult enough.

So, the password-protected key above could look something like:

PAYxy8-B9zhSG-pbyC7Z-29KRS7-rsPzAc-TF3zSP-myAigb-AJYamt-9GmNws-FT9E95-dGfp6Ri

And the address:

1Hackn-YhLRpt-tqGAiB-ew1fQA-KRGnMo-rkxk

The breaks sure make it easy to remember where you left off, and they're a heck of a lot easier to transcribe to and from paper, or between screens!  But, the password-protected key now only barely fits into an 80-column terminal, and with anything prefixed at the beginning of the line, it will overflow.   Sad

Maybe this idea deserves its own thread.