BitcoinDesign
Recommendations for abbreviations
Describe your content request
Hello, I would like to request a recommendation on how to abbreviate addresses.
First 4 ... Last 4 First 8 ... Last 4 etc
How are different address types abbreviated?
Link to the page Link
Additional context
Thanks for opening the issue, Bradley. On the addresses page, you'll see the format XXXX XXXX ... XXXX used. That's because Taproot addresses start with bc1p (others types start with 1, 3, and bc1q). This makes those first 1 or 4 characters useless for identifying specific addresses. If you wanted to, you could use XXXX ... XXXX for legacy and script addresses (like in the images above) and have two different formats based on address type. But considering those are "outdated", I think the XXXX XXXX ... XXXX format is pretty good default to go with. It's short enough to fit on mobile, and still allows users to roughly identify specific addresses (for exact identification, they should be able to quickly access the full address anyways).
What is your thinking on this design problem?
Yeah the XXXX (address type), XXXX ... XXXX should cover enough characters (8) that majority of the time verifying those should be suffice in prevent a malware attack. Four characters is also what credit cards use which people are familiar with verifying.
Here is some UX research on chunking data like this and why it's useful: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chunking/
I'll add it's also important to make the full address (when shown) use some form of chunking to make it easier to verify address content. See example below
bc1p mzfr wwnd sqmk 5yh6 9yjr 5lfg fg4e v8c0 tsc0 6e
Chunking of addresses is also illustrated in the guide here.
Was just being annoyed by this last Friday while trying to ensure addresses matched between hardware wallet and smartphone app. That little bit of space, and some slightly alternating colors make it so much easier to compare.
Duplicate of the #849 We do have it here https://bitcoin.design/guide/glossary/address/#visual-formatting If you'd like to have some more content around it let us know where and we can revisit and reopend this issue.
