Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone, I have a question about the new version of the wallet.
In the new version of the wallets has a new address bc1q44qqqt859ghegtds2p34uy9ju3nrvcp2837hj9 .
This address is not explored in Blockchain Explorer.
Some exchanges do not recognize this address when withdrawing bitcoin.

Any address that starts with bc1 is segwit (https://www.coindesk.com/information/what-is-segwit) address.

There are some block explorer that supports segwit. Examples:
https://blockchair.com
https://chain.so
https://btc.com

I think you were looking at blockchain.com. Unfortunately they do not support segwit yet.

Correct. There are a number of exchanges and other services that do not support "bech32" aka "Native SegWit" addresses. For now, your options are:

1. Continue to use "bc1"/bech32/Native SegWit addresses in Electrum and use blockexplorers/exchanges that support these addresses
2. Switch back to "Legacy" bitcoin addresses (need to specify during wallet setup):
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/15/z9vVv.png


There is also a 3rd option, which is the backwards compatible "Nested SegWit" addresses which start with a "3". However, to create these addresses in Electrum (without a hardware wallet), you need to import a "BIP39" seed (https://bitcoinelectrum.com/creating-a-p2sh-segwit-wallet-with-electrum/). However, there are quite a few issues with doing this and this setup is NOT recommended unless you fully understand the implications of doing so.

Take a look here for reference:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges

IIRC, the last time I checked only a few listed.

That table looks a bit inaccurste. I withdrew to a segwit address on bit bargain for example (over a year ago).

Electrum is trying to force users that in some way choose SegWit instead Legacy address by placing this option as a primary, and by number of threads open here with similar issues, we see that a good number of users still do not know the difference between these two options.

By placing Legacy as first option we would avoid that users create bc1 type address, what can be especially stressful in case of wallet recovery when users with Legacy wallet instead of thier balance see 0 and unknown address.

IMO this is more of a recommendation instead of forcing them.
And this is good. Bech32 has more positive aspects than negative.

Anything which increases the usage of segwit should be regarded as healty for the BTC community / network.




Or, we start demanding that user at least try to understand what they are dealing with.
Bitcoin is not like paypal. At least some small knowledge should be built around it.

And even if they don't.. they just need to search via google and will find more than enough threads dealing with the same problem.
Anyone who is capable of googling could fix this issue within minutes.

The maintainer believes in this strongly so what can we do? It would be nice if exchanges started supporting it because it does save users transaction fees.


The seed mnemonic contains  a seed prefix (https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/3.3.6/electrum/version.py) which tells electrum what type of wallet to create. So the user won't have to choose between legacy and segwit when restoring. Electrum will detect it automatically. The 0 balance issues we sometimes see on the forum are never caused by this.