Why would you "fix" something that isn't even remotely broken? That was my initial thought upon seeing the cashaddr proposal.

Oddly enough there is something almost comforting about seeing a "classic" Bitcoin address like 12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX - despite it being a combination of seemingly random characters it is immediately recognizable as a Bitcoin address to me. However if someone were to ask me to send them some money to bitcoincash:qrm6tez6y9g4g9hp2sh6ah3a07nvc5fmquap9aqaxr I'd assume they somehow managed to type "bitcoincash:" before their cat jumped on their keyboard.

So yes, you could say the idea took some getting used to - but now I can see why we actually do benefit from this new address format.

Truth is that I'm not the kind of person developers should keep in mind at all. I'm an engineer and a long-time Bitcoin user. 12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX might be recognizable to me but the average (new) user is just going to assume whoever typed it suffered a sudden stroke. The new address format however includes (by default) the bitcoincash: prefix - it'll be instantly clear what this address is usable for.

Those who fork Bitcoin mostly just change the version byte which usually gives you a different (single-character) prefix - it's not clear at all what kind of currency this address belongs to without explicitly specifying it. And then there's that awful issue with QR-codes (mostly in mobile wallets) where some clients expect "bitcoin:", some expect "bitcoincash:" and some expect no prefix at all.

If we aim to be the currency of the world we have to ensure Bitcoin Cash provides a rock solid user experience. The new address format provides clarity with a prefix while also making it impossible to send coins to the "wrong side of the fork".

Technical arguments for this change are often made and I will be the very last one to argue against them. It's nice having better checksumming. It's nice having error correction. No more case-sensitivity is super convenient. But the truth is those things weren't really broken .

This is going to be a difficult change. There will without any doubt be a period of mild confusion after the switch and we will have to keep in mind that really all that changes is encoding - it'll be easy to convert back and forward.