Pieter Wuille: New Address Type for SegWit Addresses
Channel: SF Bitcoin Developers
Date: 2017-03-30

Here's a link to the slides: https://prezi.com/gwnjkqjqjjbz/bech32-a-base32-address-format/
BIP Proposal: https://github.com/sipa/bech32/blob/master/bip-witaddr.mediawiki
Demo Website: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/bech32/demo/demo.html

Pieter Wuille, Bitcoin Core Developer and Co-Founder of Blockstream, discussed his recent Bitcoin Improvement Proposal regarding a new SegWit address format.

"Recently, we proposed a new address type for SegWit addresses. The format uses base 32 and a simple checksum algorithm with strong error detection properties. In this talk, I will go over the motivation, design and analyses that led up to the BIP draft. 

Segregated Witness, as described in BIP 141 and BIP 143, enables new output types P2WPKH and P2WSH, and possibly more later. However, wallets as they exist today, won't be able to produce these directly because of a lack of a common associated address type. One possibility would be to continue the tradition of using Base58, but it has several drawbacks. Instead, the proposal suggests to use Base32, plus a BCH-based checksum.

Both the chosen character set and the checksum constants were chosen after intensive computer searches. I will also go into the methods,goals and results here, and what was learned from it."