Address
The Address (Reed Solomon Address) is an account attribute derived from the first 8 bytes of the public key. The address also contains the chain ID as a prefix that identifies the blockchain network. Therefore an address on the mainnet cannot be used on the testnet or a multiverse chain and vice versa.
Entering the secret passphrase in the mainnet, testnet, or any multiverse chain based on Signum will lead to the same public key. The addresses are built with a different prefix to make it easy to see for which network the passphrase is used! For example : Mainnet : S-TTRER-GGGF-HZ56-FGGR Testnet : TS-TTRER-GGGF-HZ56-FGGR
The first 8 bytes of the public key are used to give the account ID as a long integer. The account ID is used to create the address (Read-Solomon).
The short form of Signum account numbers (addresses) are of the form: S-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXX
It is the default format in the official client, where X is a non-ambiguous number or alphabetic character (the letters I and O and the numbers 1 and 0 are not used). Addresses are always prefixed with the corresponding blockchain ID (like “S-“for the mainnet), and hyphens are used to separate the address into 4, 4, 4, and 5 characters. The addresses are NOT case-sensitive.
This form improves reliability by introducing redundancy to detect and correct errors when entering and using Signum account numbers.
The internal format for Signum account numbers is an entirely numeric 64-bit identifier derived from the account’s private key. This format is error-prone because a single error when typing a character can result in transactions being unintentionally sent to the wrong account.
Reed-Solomon error-correction codes primarily remedy this issue by adding redundancy to addresses. The Reed-Solomon format was chosen because:
- the account collision rate is the same as the default address format;
- the system’s basic error correction can be used to assist users in typing addresses;
- some programming languages do not have a native MD5 hashing function, and the Reed-Solomon implementation is more straightforward than MD5;
- the chance of a random address collision, using Signum’s implementation of 4 “check-bits,” is 1 in a million (20-bit redundancy);
- the address length is always 17 characters;
- the “S” prefix makes the addresses easily recognizable as belonging to the Signum mainnet.