In another move that will provide greater separation between Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Bitcoin SV, Money Button has announced that it has dumped the CashAddr address format and reverted back to using legacy cryptocurrency addresses. This is more than likely just the beginning and other entities will undoubtedly follow suit. The decision follows a suggestion made by the company’s CEO, Ryan X. Charles, from November.
On November 21, Charles tweeted, “I think we should ditch cashaddr for Bitcoin SV and go back to the original format that starts with a 1. Many hardware wallets and exchanges never adopted cashaddr, and although it’s irritatingly the same as BTC, at least we will have consistency between wallets.”
After receiving a considerable amount of feedback on the idea, Money Button pushed forward with the switch, announcing this past Saturday on Twitter, “It is done. We are back to the legacy address format now! All addresses start with a 1, the way it should be!”
Both Bitcoin Core (BTC) and BCH used an address format that was virtually identical when BCH first split from BTC. This initially caused some confusion, leading to the creation of the CashAddr format, which was never fully supported by every entity involved with BCH. Some still used the legacy format, while others made the transition, but the lack of widespread acceptance was cause for it to not have been considered a complete success. This was sometimes cumbersome, as it forced crypto users to “translate” one format to the other if they were conducting transactions involving two entities that didn’t use the same format.
One of the main goals, according to Money Button, is to make transactions easier. They explain in a separate Twitter post that users will be able to send from one wallet or exchange to another without having to use a converter.
Of course, whether legacy or CashAddr formats are used may not necessarily be the only long-term solution. More and more, wallets are moving to the use of “nicknames” that allow users to assign words to their addresses to conduct transactions. Most notably, BSV supporter HandCash has already introduced the trait with its wallet.
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