Talk:Firstbits

Reverting unback claims

Reverting claims that

Firstbits is generally considered to be a bad idea because it encourages transaction spam.
This position is held by most, if not all, of Bitcoin developers.

"transaction spam" is not a generally accepted meaningful term - any transaction is legitimate. Certainly such a strong claim that presumes to speak on behalf of "most or all of the devs" must be backed by evidence.

Luke-Jr, please do not revert this without a discussion, and do not add the claim with a prefix such as "According to some".

Ripper234 (talk) 01:54, 1 May 2013 (GMT)

Reverting with a discussion: I'm not aware of a single developer who disagrees with the position stated. --Luke-jr (talk) 05:20, 2 May 2013 (GMT)

firstbits as a tool to find an address

While I agree with the hefty criticism, I often have the problem that I want to check something about an address (or transaction hash or block hash or ...) and while the first 5 letters would uniquely identify the item, block explorers force me to type it in to provide all letters instead of making "smart suggestions". I guess this use case would be very legitimate. (I would be the first to support a fee penalty for sending to addresses that already had transactions but still, first bits are very relevant identifiers that should be easier to use.)

--Giszmo (talk) 18:06, 30 June 2016 (UTC)