The Bitcoin Cash Community Prepares for 'Change the Address Day'

The Bitcoin Cash (BCH) community, developers, and businesses that support the decentralized currency are preparing for “Change the Address Day” scheduled for January 14. At that time the BCH network and its participants will upgrade the protocol’s address format to one proposed by Bitcoin ABC developer Amaury Séchet.

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Bitcoin Cash Plans to Upgrade Its Address Format on January 14, 2018

This past November news.Bitcoin.com reported on the lead developer of Bitcoin ABC, Amaury Séchet, proposing to change the address format in the bitcoin cash protocol. The new format will be based on the ‘bech32’ codebase and will prevent bitcoin cash from being sent to bitcoin core (BTC) addresses after the upgrade. In addition to that specific benefit the address format called the “Cashaddr format” will also provide enhancements for new protocol features.

Deploying an Address Change Takes Time for BCH Participants to Upgrade

For instance, the new address format could progress the concept of Zero Knowledge Proofs being added to the BCH network. Further, Cashaddr format will provide a strong checksum that will offer better efficiency, and the new format will also improve QR coding as well. Amaury Séchet has said that the proposed format will also allow developers to “deploy a more secure way of doing multi-party smart contracts in the future.” Séchet had stated during his proposal that changing the address was “pressing” due to people mistakenly sending BCH to BTC addresses or vice-versa.

“In order to reduce confusion for users with the use of different addresses, I think it is important to deploy this shortly and stop the fragmentation of the ecosystem,” explains Séchet on the developer mailing list.

Deploying such a change on the network will take some time for all the wallets, exchanges and merchants to upgrade.

Businesses Are Currently Preparing for the Change

At the moment businesses are steadily preparing for “Change the Address Day.” The blockchain explorer Blockchair says it is developing support for Bench32-based BCH addresses. Openbazaar says the developer Chris Pacia has prepared the marketplace wallets for the new change. Both wallets Stash and Edge (formally Airbitz) says they will be prepared for the Cashaddr format alongside the popular BCH wallet Electron Cash. The peer-to-peer lending platform BTCpop will also support the new format stating:

We will support Bech32 for bitcoin cash on January 14th. We’ll provide a simple converter as well so users can convert the deposit address to the current format — Withdrawals will work to both formats.

BCH Supporters Are Confident the Upgrade Will Be Smooth

A significant portion of the bitcoin cash community seems to be well prepared for the pending upgrade. There are still over three weeks left for other businesses and infrastructure providers to prepare for the Bech32 format. Many BCH supporters believe the upgrade will be smooth and successful like the hard fork on November 13 that changed the protocol difficulty adjustment algorithm. Moreover, the upgrade is not a fork type of protocol change as it merely alters the bitcoin cash address serialization.

What do you think about ‘Change the Address Day’ scheduled for January 14? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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