If you aren't meant to type in ethereum addresses, why does all the ethereum software provide a textbox to let you type it in? Are they doing this to let you shoot yourself in the foot? Are they plain malicious or just extremely dumb?
While you may not know anyone who manually types in an address, there are plenty of stories about people who do (and make a typo) on reddit & other discussion boards.
Literally they could have just copied BTC and implemented base58check from the get go, it would take any competent programmer an hour or two tops. But it was too much work for the _MASTER PROGRAMMERS_ behind ethereum.
Not too much work to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, though. Ofc something so simple is an EIP.
While you may not know anyone who manually types in an address, there are plenty of stories about people who do (and make a typo) on reddit & other discussion boards.