Bitcoin Forum

While copy / pasting address suppose be miss first or last charactor what will happen if that BTC is sent to incomplete address?

It will give an error of "Invalid Address", probably. :)

Yes, it has a checksum included that prevents these sort of errors. Its very unlikely that you miss a character at the end (or anywhere else for that matter) and still have a valid address.

all modern wallets validate address before trying to send to network. you will get an invalid address error. don't worry.

Thanks for info  :)

I noticed if I scanned a QR code the bc.i wallet doesn't check immediately if it's a wallet. It will paste whatever QR string holds.

Your client will see that the addresses checksum fails. Or if it's sloppy, maybe not. In that case, the network would reject it.

There are two possibilities...either the client will give you an invalid address message or reject it..or the thing will push through and the bitcoin will be lost...don't know about the latter since I havent test it out yet.

will be an error like Invalid address or something like that but u wont lose your BTC

It's not possible to send to an incomplete address.

Don't worrie it's impossible as far as I know as it should come back as a error invalid address hope this helped.

I try this to make sure and it tell me invalid address. I even try adding extra letter on the end and it still say invalid address. I think you are safe:-)

Bitcoin addresses are base58 encoded, and they have validation rules that must be passed for a payment to work. Even if you try and manually create a transaction for a bad address it will be rejected by the nodes you broadcast it to.

it will surely give an error message because it has an minimum limit you can try myclium wallet to check the bitcoin address you are sending your coins are valid or not

Your first character has to be either 1 or 3 so an error will occur and the transaction will not be made. The address goes through some checks before it is being sent. The odds of getting Bitcoins sent to an address typed wrongly is 1 in 4 billion. Amount will only be sent if you send it to an address you copied from elsewhere and didn't copy the one that you are sending to.

No worries. You see error from client due to invalid address. BTC addresses are encoded and there are certain rules of validation before the transaction would be made. So your transaction won't happen. That's something I tested and can confirm. These are strict rules and I think you cannot easily bypass them. If you can, remember to tell me how you did it : - ) However, even if the client sent the transaction, the network wouldn't accept it so you will not lose your BTC.

Once I have entered the wrong addresses, it said: "invalid address", so I couldn't send it at all.

There is a mechanism to prevent to send money to bad/incomplete addresses. Like previous said: Bitcoin addresses are base58 encoded, and they have validation rules that must be passed for a payment to work.

Therefore, you can't send out btc to the incomplete address, don't worry.  ;)

The validation rules are applied when taking the user's base58 input. This is done by the user's client only. After passing the checks, the client constructs the raw transaction which is finally seen by other clients, as known as the network.

In spite the final raw transaction is checked by the network, the raw output script which defines who can claim the funds was derived from the originating base58 string doesn't have a check sum anymore and thus the transaction wouldn't get rejected as long as the constructed transaction follows the rules of the protocol.

This means: As long as you use a well reviewed client sort of the known like Core, Electrum, Armory, you shouldn't fear of sending to an incomplete address.

If you use someone's else unreviewed client or you're even about to roll up your own bitcoin client, a flaw in the validation mechamism could trigger unpredictable behaviour which includes crashing and refusing to accept a valid bitcoin address - in the best case. In the worst case a heavily flawed client could technically craft a valid transaction from faulty treatment of invalid user input which renders the funds inaccessible.