Grokking Bitcoin

Chapter 3. Addresses

This chapter covers

• Basic privacy
• Replacing names with public key hashes
• Protecting against expensive typing errors

By the time you reach the end of this chapter, the cookie token spreadsheet will no longer have personal names—you’ll be replacing these names with hashes of public keys. This is useful from a privacy perspective. No one can easily see who’s paying whom, making it harder for others to extract information from the spreadsheet and see how many cookies any of your coworkers eat. Lisa also finds this useful because she doesn’t have to maintain a table of names and public keys.

When switching to public key hashes in the spreadsheet, coworkers will no longer use names in their emails to Lisa. They will instead ...