What is a Bitcoin Address and Different Types of Bitcoin Address?

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Here we will not go with a full technical explanation, because here we are going to explain all of you in a very simple way about the Bitcoin address so that everyone can understand it easily.

Note: Here we will talk about types of Bitcoin address not the type of Bitcoin wallets, so don’t be confused. You can visit here to know about the most trusted Bitcoin wallets.

What is a Bitcoin Address?

A Bitcoin address consists of randomly generated digits, upper case alphabets and lower case alphabets.

These characters can be 26-35 in numbers depending upon the type of address, usually, know as an identifier in a technical way.

We can say a Bitcoin address is like an email address which you share with others to receive payments in your wallet. Each and every address is unique and can be used more than once to accept/receive payments.

TYPES OF BITCOIN ADDRESS:

Bitcoin address are of mainly three types .

  1. P2PKH Address
  2. P2SH Address
  3. Bech32 Address

(1) P2PKH address is a type of address which starts with “1”, for example:

1KNhK64iMPCyt8BwLWnXJqEopmawhMDjvZ

This type of address is supported by all platforms which are accepting Bitcoin, so we can have this type of address everywhere in use without taking any tension of acceptance or not.

(2) P2SH address are those BTC address which starts with the digit “3”, for example

             3FU9vRFfHanvKJWaQZ8NWPUqJ7EBaRXCJN

This address uses by the most of the platform, but unfortunately, few platforms ( like yobit and some other exchanges ) are not allowing their system to send Bitcoin at P2SH type of addresses, so this type of address may have limitations at few places.

(3)  Bech32 is that type of Bitcoin address which starts with the character “bc1”, for example

   bc1q38cksu8gggz8j908t8v7ewt8jqgcgqxec0d8sp

This type of the address is very new to this field ( not fresh but old about 2 years ), I said new because many people are unaware about this type of address and they are following the only traditional old type of address supporting Bitcoin wallets.

Here most best Bitcoin address is bech32 address because it is modified part of the Bitcoin algorithm to make a transaction of Bitcoin from one wallet to another that has better efficiency i.e faster to confirm and cheaper by fee.

Suggestion: If you are looking for that type of Bitcoin wallet which has the support of all last two types of address for a single wallet to receive/send Bitcoin then go with mycelium wallet ( available at playstore/Appstore )

Conclusion: If you are looking for a Bitcoin wallet through which you can transfer Bitcoin at cheap fee then first confirm the wallet whether it has bech32 address facility or not.

Also Read: Binance Trust Wallet Starts Staking Service with support to Tezos