Using squares, circles and triangles with colours to represent bitcoin addresses

herzmeister

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Quote from: Ente on January 27, 2013, 03:08:31 PM

Quote from: jl2012 on January 26, 2013, 08:35:43 AM

How about people with color blindness?

Quote from: arklan on January 25, 2013, 08:50:33 AM

one word: colorblind. i promise you all this looks quite different to my screwy eyes then to others.

Thank you for reminding us.

Maybe use black, darker blue, dark green, normal red, light yellow so that also the colorblind easily can identify the difference.

Ente

legendary

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Quote from: Red Emerald on January 27, 2013, 03:46:12 PM

I don't see inventing a new alphabet doing much to make copying addresses easier.

I like the idea of identicons as an additional checksum. I'm color blind too and think that they still work plenty well for that.

..for copying addresses? Nah, we still need nfc/usb/qr for that!
These *icons are for visual, human-readable checksum only!

Ente

Red Emerald

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I don't see inventing a new alphabet doing much to make copying addresses easier.

I like the idea of identicons as an additional checksum. I'm color blind too and think that they still work plenty well for that.

Ente

legendary

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Quote from: jl2012 on January 26, 2013, 08:35:43 AM

How about people with color blindness?

Quote from: arklan on January 25, 2013, 08:50:33 AM

one word: colorblind. i promise you all this looks quite different to my screwy eyes then to others.

Thank you for reminding us.
I would suggest a two-fold way:

Display some graphical representation of the address, any of the ones posted will do (as long as it works offline too!). As this has both color and symbol/pattern in it, even "colorblind" people would see a difference in many cases.

Display the first 4 and last 4 letters of the address too. This both helps "colorblind" folks as well as make (close) collisions of the graphic less likely. Depending on the graphical keyspace it could be too easy to generate the whole set once for addresses the attacker controls, and then replace the valid one with one which has the same or similar symbol. This might not be possible with 8 additional digits per symbol, but I didn't calculate through it..

Ente

jl2012

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How about people with color blindness?

constitution

newbie

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Interesting Idea, but I honestly dont see this being accepted by the community.

K1773R

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/dev/null

Quote from: rini17 on January 25, 2013, 06:12:45 PM

I prefer unicorns! Bitcoin addresses are supported too, not just email (but not whole address fits the input).

u can pass it to the API (just read trough it), so it fits

rini17

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GO http://bitcointa.lk !!! My new nick: jurov

I prefer unicorns! Bitcoin addresses are supported too, not just email (but not whole address fits the input).

mskwik

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Quote from: phelix on January 23, 2013, 02:23:47 AM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

generator: http://finalboss.org/g/

Identicons for bitcoin addresses have been discussed before:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/btcaddrme-bitcoin-address-identicon-122240

In short it works fairly well as an extra checksum but it has much less entropy than the full address so matching the first few address characters and the icon is not that hard. It depends on your use case how useful it really is, it can help with easily identifying mistyping of addresses (but so can the built-in checksum), but doesn't necessarily prevent spoofing one address with another similar one.

arklan

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one word: colorblind. i promise you all this looks quite different to my screwy eyes then to others.

phelix

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one could use hash-colored qr codes as identicons...

if your client calculates the same code from the address you can be pretty sure you copy/pasted the right one.

Red Emerald

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Quote from: Matthew N. Wright on January 25, 2013, 01:00:42 AM

Quote from: phelix on January 23, 2013, 02:23:47 AM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

generator: http://finalboss.org/g/

Is there a way to read these in reverse and get the string from the image?

Nope. Thats by design since they were originally meant to identify IPs without revealing the IP.

If the input fields for addresses in the client had a small identicon next to them, and whatever people were manually copying from also had an identicon, it would be a quick way to check for typos in addition to bitcoin's built in checksum. If you are copy/pasting from the same computer, or using a QR scanner, there isn't really a need.

Matthew N. Wright

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Quote from: phelix on January 23, 2013, 02:23:47 AM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

generator: http://finalboss.org/g/

Is there a way to read these in reverse and get the string from the image?

theymos

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Quote from: remotemass on January 19, 2013, 03:31:47 PM

very rough draft:

Straight substitution isn't very creative/interesting IMO. I do like the idea of representing addresses as cool-looking images, though.

paybitcoin

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1h79nc

Don't forget about randomart used with ssh keys:

http://superuser.com/questions/22535/what-is-randomart-produced-by-ssh-keygen

sample:

Code:

Your identification has been saved in test.
Your public key has been saved in test.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
20:e9:b0:5b:5a:2b:ad:e8:4d:e4:b3:a0:32:49:2d:97 evan
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
| |
| . |
| . o . |
| + . . |
| o.= S |
| ooE . |
|.o*+o |
|=.+oo |
|=o.o |
+-----------------+

runeks

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Check out this paper: https://sparrow.ece.cmu.edu/group/pub/old-pubs/validation.pdf

Looks like they're taking the task seriously (defining the image-producing function to have the same properties as a hash function). The images look nice and distinct. But I'm not sure it can produce 2^160 sufficiently visually distinct images. Interesting none the less.

EDIT: This looks cool too, and it's open source: http://www.thevash.com/

Ente

legendary

Activity: 2126

Merit: 1001

I like where this is going!
Exactly, this will be very important for visually comparing adresses on my computer and a dedicated wallet hardware with display.
Identicon: So, how many bits would fit into one of those? Wikipedia didn't help with technical details..
Runeks, your system is nice too! 12x12? Champion!

Ente

Lethn

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I like that idea a lot, in case you didn't gather from my rants about math I'm not a mathematical thinker, shapes etc. are generally how I see the world not only that, if these could be turned into QR codes or even our usernames etc, that would be fucking badass!

They remind me a lot of the Japanese clan mons ( emblems ) in Shogun 2, maybe we could have our own unique symbols for Bitcoin addresses Wink

I bet this would get quite a bit of attention from normal people too.

Edit: I like this a lot lol! Cheesy

I put my username in and it popped out the avatar I put up Tongue

runeks

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Oh, my three-color images feel so primitive now.

But seriously, that might be useful if they really can encode 160 bits of entropy, and the changes aren't too subtle.

phelix

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Activity: 1708

Merit: 1020

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identicon

generator: http://finalboss.org/g/

Topic: Using squares, circles and triangles with colours to represent bitcoin addresses (Read 5422 times)