To me I think it will more safe when an address is short like bank account someone can easily carry it offhand and make use of it anytime but 42 digits numbers is too bad ,just check it out ,it remove someone off balance
The problem with it, is its higher potential to have "
collisions".
Firstly, addresses are either base58, bech32, bech32m (
etc.) -encoded scriptPubkey which are commonly hash of a public key or a redeem script.
So, reducing the length would require to use a different hash function with smaller output to make the encoded address shorter.
But its implementation will not be the main issue.
The issue is, if it's shorter than
HASH160, the size will be significantly reduce the chance of a private key to address collision since the latter's total number of combinations will be even lower than today's common addresses.
For example:
There are about 2^160 possible legacy address (
P2PKH).
While there about about 2^256 private keys.
Since the latter is a lot higher than the former, theoretically on average, there are 2^96 different private keys could generate the same address.
That number is just too high that's why it still never happens.
But if you try to shorten it to get to about way more than that prvkeys per address, it can get to the point that someone else's "
short address" can be generated by another with a different private key.