Bitcoin Forum

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I do not have any kind of formal (or even informal) training in Bitcoin, but I have used it in various ways.  I have an observation on which I would appreciate comments.  I have seen three "kinds" of wallet IDs:

-- 1(next: Capital Letter) followed by 32 alphanumerics (34 total)   <-- Lots & Lots of them!
-- 1(next: a single digit number) followed by 32 alphanumerics (34 total)   <-- Lots & Lots of these too!
-- 1(next: small letter) followed by 31 alphanumerics (33 total)  <-- Very few

The third case above has worked OK for several transactions.

Why are some wallet ID numbers one "alphanumeric "short"?

Why are there so few wallet IDs that have a small letter (vs. a CAPITAL) as the second alphanumeric?

This is because a wallet ID is a base58 representation of a number (with some cruft at the end for typo verification/checksumming). A similar thing can happen with base 10 numbers. For example, choose a bunch of random numbers from 1 to 1,000,000. Most will be of the form ###,###. Some will be of the form ##,###. Even fewer will be #,###; and so on (less probable) with ###; ##; #.

Due to the range in which these numbers can fall, few will get a lowercase leading letter. Imagine again that we're picking numbers between 1 and 627,500. The leading digit is more likely to be one of 0,1,2,3,4 than it is to be one of 5,6,7,8,9. A similar thing happens with base58check (since the actual address "number" doesn't perfectly "align" to base 58 as in this example).

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Thanks for the nice explanation!

Now I know who to ask re other technical questions...

_j/k   :)

sweet mother jesus...!

It's fine, I'm happy to answer questions that I am qualified and able to.