Agree. Copy pasting and QR code are still not safe at all w/out checking carefully by yourself.
To all: Speaking of double checking addresses before doing transaction.
How or what is the fastest way to check it?
Because what I am doing when checking is first I am comparing some first few letters/digits of the bitcoin address and the some of last digits/letters.
It could give you a false feel of safety, if you only check the first few and the last few digits/letters of a bitcoin address...To all: Speaking of double checking addresses before doing transaction.
How or what is the fastest way to check it?
Because what I am doing when checking is first I am comparing some first few letters/digits of the bitcoin address and the some of last digits/letters.
Although I don't really know how hard and resource demanding would be for a clipboard virus to calculate a similar bitcoin address on the fly (in that few seconds when you copy/paste the address), just to scam you this way... I think the clipboard virus just replace the target bitcoin address with a given one, it just don't calculate anything...
I don't really think that it's possible to generate/search for a different bitcoin address that matches the original address in the first/last part, so checking the first/last part could be safe... but that's not enough, everyone should check everything every time...
Just thinking about how resource demanding to search for a proper vanity address, and the vanity address just means that the first part of the bitcoin address is unique but the last part is still random... Of course it would be more easy to generate an address that only matches the first 2 characters and the last 2 characters, so you should check at least 5-6 characters from the beginning and from the end to be on the safe side... but the safest is to check everything
The time it takes to generate an address that matches 6 characters (3 at the beginning and 3 at the end) is 10-20 seconds on my computer. It's not long although not very fast for hot swap.
But attacker can use a network of bots or can pregenerate such addresses and request them over the network. Or replace the address when reused (during the first use everything will be fine, but on another use, for example, in a day, the address will be as similar as possible). The likelihood of such tricks is small, but still do not neglect them.
