Bitcoin Forum

When working with multiple currencies, it would be nice to be able to validate addresses as belonging to one currency or another, eg:  this appears to be a valid LTC address but is not a valid BTC address.

So I guess this question can be divided into parts:

1) Given address Y that validates for currency X, will it also validate for currencies A,B,C...?

2) Given just address Y, is there any good way to identify the currency?    ( I doubt it )

I suspect the answer is that they are all the same and there is no way to know.  eg bitcoind will validate the same as litecoind the same as junkcoind, etc.   Hoping I am wrong...

thanks for your insights.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_address_prefixes (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_address_prefixes)

Well that is good news.  thank-you Zeilap.

I notice that the list on that page does not include many/most of the recent altcoins.  This makes me wonder if those altcoin devs are aware of the address prefix, and (in general) are modifying them, or not.

Also, in some limited testing with litecoin testnet addresses, I see that they are prefixed with m, the same as bitcoin testnet.  So that means that any address identification routine based on the 1st byte would be unable to distinguish between BTC and LTC, unless I am missing something.

Just observations.  Thanks again for the pointer.

My guess is that simply no one is bothing to update the wiki. After all, there is a new altcoin every day :P