Re: Just lost $4000 because of addresses starting with "bc1p"
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I don't understand, what was the point of changing it or adding all this crap?One of the reason is limitation with old address format.
Motivation
For most of its history, Bitcoin has relied on base58 addresses with a truncated double-SHA256 checksum. They were part of the original software and their scope was extended in BIP13 for Pay-to-script-hash (P2SH). However, both the character set and the checksum algorithm have limitations:
For most of its history, Bitcoin has relied on base58 addresses with a truncated double-SHA256 checksum. They were part of the original software and their scope was extended in BIP13 for Pay-to-script-hash (P2SH). However, both the character set and the checksum algorithm have limitations:
- Base58 needs a lot of space in QR codes, as it cannot use the alphanumeric mode.
- The mixed case in base58 makes it inconvenient to reliably write down, type on mobile keyboards, or read out loud.
- The double SHA256 checksum is slow and has no error-detection guarantees.
- Most of the research on error-detecting codes only applies to character-set sizes that are a prime power, which 58 is not.
- Base58 decoding is complicated and relatively slow.
What the hell was wrong with just keeping addresses the way they were already? 
In short, it's a lot harder to implement new feature (such as SegWit and Taproot) while keep using P2SH address (start with character "3").