Bitcoin Forum

I Own a Bitcoin ATM company and a lot of my customers click on litecoin when they really want to buy bitcoin, they scan their Bitcoin wallet and insert cash. The machine just sends Litecoin to bitcoin address and now the money is stuck. Is there a way to recover it? Can we share some video link with them that they can use to get their funds?

It is floating in the air forever but there are users had tried to cancel the transaction process and that is by sending a litecoin itself with a small amount and that could possibly cancel the first transaction. However, I still do not know if it really works.

This clearly the cryptocurrency flaws. Can we do something abouy this by having a transaction canceled whe it is sending to a wrong crypto address or address that is not compatible to the sending address.

the only way you could do that is if you used the very old multi signature versions of addresses that litecoin used which started with 3.
since these are "multi" signature, you have to first get all the private keys that are used to create that address. it can be anything between 1 and 15. then you simply import all those in a litecoin wallet and setting the required keys to the appropriate one depending on how many are required when this address was set up (for example 2 of 3 is a common choice.)

unfortunately i don't know any videos that can help here. it is the user's fault and they should be asking this question not you.

No they cannot. Best way to prevent this is just place a large disclaimer on your machines that Litecoin and Bitcoin isn't directly compatible with each other, thus sending bitcoins to a litecoin address and vice-versa would be a dumb thing to do since you're basically sending crypto to the void.

Also, owning a bitcoin ATM, you must know that litecoins can't be received in bitcoin addresses, so it's partly your fault.


Double-spending only works if the transaction isn't confirmed yet and you can still create a new transaction with higher fees. However in this case, I don't think it will be possible since the transactions may have been confirmed already.


It'll be on the wallet provider's end to do such thing, not really cryptocurrencies per se, but it would be certainly a great addition for people who don't even bother double-checking what they're doing.

First of all you should take some action to reduce the number of such cases, and you can do that with some warnings on your ATMs. I am not sure can you add extra step in buying process like "please check what coin you want to buy / and your receiving address".

For recovering Litecoin from Bitcoin wallets, it depends of wallets where coins are send. User need private key of that bitcoin address, and then that private key can be imported in Litecoin wallet to restore trapped coins.

To how export bitcoin private keys depends on individual wallet, but if user manage to get private key then the easiest way is to use Electrum Litecoin Wallet (https://electrum-ltc.org/) to import private key/s.

OP, I believe the software in your ATM machines are broken. It's supposed to do a check on the prefix byte of either the Bitcoin or Litecoin address it's sending to before sending the coins.

Plus what Lucius said might work, if Bitcoin and Litecoin handle signatures and keys the same way.

I didn't encounter this yet... sending different coin from a different type of coins wallet but for what i've known (from different exchange site) and from users here in the forum if you send a different coin to a different type of wallet it's either it's lost (just like what it was said on the exchange) or it would have an error. But i've tried to search in to forums and found out this answer (It states that it sends bitcoin to litecoin address but i think it works both ways):

"A Bitcoin or Litecoin address consists of:

• a prefix byte
• a 160-bit hash of a public key
• a 32-bit checksum
• all base-58 encoded.

Bitcoin and Litecoin use different prefix bytes; this is why most Bitcoin addresses start with 1, while most Litecoin addresses start with L.

When you use a Bitcoin client to try to send money to an address, it should perform a number of checks on that address. One of those checks would be the prefix byte. When it notices that the address doesn't have the correct prefix byte for Bitcoin, it should barf, complaining that you have specified an invalid address. It wouldn't try to create a transaction at all."

Retrieved from: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/16933/what-happens-if-you-send-bitcoin-to-a-litecoin-address

You need to update your crypto atms fast. You need to program it in such way that it can detect and filter out what kind of wallet address the customer is trying to input or at least remind them that the wallet address they have inputted is not intended for that crypto, you need something in the system that will stop/block them for paying for the wrong crypto. Surely this is an avoidable mess and cases similar to this one won't stop in the future not unless you do something to improve your software as its the main problem here.

I think you are right mate. Update is needed for that machine to identify compatible addresses in sending  funds because we already know that cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible. A lot of people are doing this thing everyday most especially newcomers. I even have a friend that has the same issue she accidentally sent  Litecoins intoa Bitcoin address and now hoping to get it back if there  is another way to recover it.

i think it will never recover, and i think that your transaction will be there forever and ever, i dont know how to recover it, because the transaction in blockchain network is irreversible, it means that you can't cancel your transaction

It might be, but i don't think that the usage of some of them will decrease 100% unless other things happens besides of it.

Why? Because there is so many different people in the world right now with so many different tastes that finding customers for something is not that hard like it used to be and also they can really easily sustain with the ones the can get.

Your ATM is badly designed. How can you claim you run a Bitcoin ATM company and not already know all transactions are final? Once confirmed (in the Litecoin blockchain), the litecoins are destroyed.

Bitcoin addresses start with 1, 3 or bc1. Litecoin addresses start with L. How is your software unable to catch such simple mistake? Perhaps you should remove Litecoin support altogether, or hide it more, at least until you can make your software recognize and prevent this.

I now see in that guide (https://cryptovoid.net/recovering-ltc-sent-to-a-btc-address/) you have a slight chance of recovering funds if they were sent to a Bitcoin SegWit address. Good luck.

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Lets see, you format your computer, and now its the computer fault because it let you to?
Of course you would be against freedom, you need "someone" forcibly preventing you to do it, like Apple, or the State...

Yes, I think this will help. Something like "error in address" . The best solution will be to bar some inappropriate address being imputed in the future because more customers are likely to do hasty transaction without triple checking at least.

Because speaking plainly here cryptotrade78u's crypto atm business is at fault here, they know themselves that they will be getting a lot of inexperience customers buying cryptocurrencies in their atm yet they have a interface that doesn't detect or at least warn you that you are giving out the wrong wallet address for the cryptocurrency you are buying. Customer's who lost money in the process are of course have grounds to push for damages as them being first time buyers should have a sufficient guide and step by step process to successfully buy the cryptocurrency they wanted, they probably don't even know what "Litecoins" are in the first place.

but this constant confusion between these coins adresses, sent litecoin to bitcoin adress, works like a slow decay, that reduces the amount of "coins"

It’s unfortunate that the lite coin is lost forever. That’s one thing all cryptocurrency users have to bear in mind. All transaction are irrevirsvible. And also it will be advisable to make a demo video that will orientate your ATM users to avoid sending of coins to different address. This is what you need to do to avoid more loss of coins when transacting with your bitcoin ATM.

I don't think there is any way to return your litecoin. Your machine should detect which is litecoin address and which is bitcoin address by prefix. I just create address for litecoin from coinbase and coinpayment its seems prefix staring from M. Perhaps few wallet start with 3 also(not sure) if starting with three that means address is litecoin or bitcoin SegWit. So you can disable SegWit for bitcoin address. So all starting with 3 will detect litecoin address. You have to update your system.

However, this article may be help you to understand,  
https://cryptofacilities.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006040974-Litecoin-Address-Format (https://cryptofacilities.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360006040974-Litecoin-Address-Format)

Mate you need to be very careful. Please take necessary steps in order to reduce the number of incidents and difficulties faced by your users/customers.
Atleast near the ATM while they are buying something, warn them that LTC will be sent instead of BTC. This gonna help to reduce the number of such incidents.
Moreover as far as recovering the stucked LTC, then it depends upon the wallet where Ltc are sent. If the wallets have private key then import the wallet tk Litecoin wallet provider and you may in that way able to recover it .
Now only do one thing along with this, just "Pray to God".

Guys, come on!!! Stop giving me hard time. I Understand the software is at fault and there should be check before sending cryptos, but i use general bytes machines. The largest company in the world with over 2000 installs. I am requesting them to look into this and perhaps they can fix the software.

Another things i am doing it, starting to offer more than 2 crypto, that will help tremendously. See, right now what happens i there is Bitcoin and Litecoin and customer Must press the icon of coin they wish to buy and these icons are next to each other, so they accidentely push Litecoin when they want to by Bitcoin.

If i started offering Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, Dash & Litecoin. I can arrange icons where bitcoin is on the extreme left and Litecoin is on the extreme right, so chances of that accident are a lot less.

Transactions that are under $50, i simply send them bitcoin and take the loss as a company but we have had couple of $1000 transactions and thats where i feel bad.

Is this even possible? How can one send bitcoin into a litcoin wallet address what are the chances of the transcation being completed or does litcoin wallet address support bitcoin

When this happens, i can see LTC in Bitcoin wallet in Litecoin explorer

Well as their customer you should really complain to them (General Bytes).

Here is an example from the exchange Poloniex (https://poloniex.com/):

https://i.ibb.co/n3hQGJq/image.png

So its not like you are the only one, people have suffered from this since the first fork (Litecoin) appeared.

In the meantime, you could also place a sticker warning people about this, at least its better than nothing:

• Do not send litecoin to a Bitcoin address, do not send bitcoin to a Litecoin address, You will lose your coins!
• A Bitcoin address can be recognized because it starts with 1, 3 or bc1 (if your ATM supports bech32, else omit bc1).
• A Litecoin address can be recognized because it starts with L (Don't bother with the ancient 3, no one should be using those).

And so on with the rest of the coins... They all have their distinctive addresses.

You could design a pretty infographic using the coin logos for your sticker, perhaps something resembling bitcoin and litecoin don't mix.

Ie: "BTC to LTC address or LTC to BTC address = your coins are lost. Double check you are sending bitcoin to a bitcoin address ONLY, or litecoin to a litecoin address ONLY. We cannot be held responsible for coins sent to the wrong address (they are destroyed)." or such, be creative; but really complain to General Bytes or seek an alternative. Being "the largest" doesn't mean being "the best". See Mt.Gox in 2012~2013...

Sorry about that but I don't think recovering  the funds would be possible. Better get used to how to make transactions in crypto and always make sure you are sending funds to compatible blockchains and you have the right address.

Sadly, they cannot get back it and the transactions are irreversible. I may suggest aside from logo, indicate it's name beside the logo itself. Some may familiar only with the logo. And you can also create pop up reminders at the bottom or upper of the atm screen for them to be cautious and double check the adress if it is the right destination address.

I am confused about this, the machine may have some systemic errors. The scan ought to have detected that it wasn't a bitcoin wallet and read as an invalid address. Besides, the buyers ought to have read the message prompt too.

Add a big fat warning that sending the funds to a wrong type of wallet it will result in a loss and you will not be responsible for that loss.
There should be a user agreement that the user have to read and click on to be sure that he has read it .
And before he confirm the transaction there should be a warning message again like : You are buying LTC, YOU NEED A LITECOIN WALLET TO RECEIVE THE FUNDS.

I've been working in the IT support for years, I've seen many dump things in my life so I'm pretty sure this wont stop them but for sure will reduce some of the possible loss.

You can't stop the dump people from loosing money, try to do your best to warn them.

I would add some random "captcha" at the end, something among these lines:

If you understand what we are saying please confirm by telling us the color of the white roof in the following input box...

And yes, i have also done my decade+ of IT support...

you would think by now they would have something patched in the core that would send back coins sent to invalid addresses..
maybe one day they will and OP will become very rich getting all the misplaced bitcoin back.

That's pretty unfortunate. Your customers are definitely not obliged to a refund, but this is also partially your fault.

Popular BTC ATMs that I've personally used to test out will always tell you if an address is invalid. If you have a multi-crypto machine, that should be a must thing for you to do, especially when this seems like a big issue. A couple of simple lines of code checking their validity isn't hard for a BTC ATM owner.

Not really. The customer selected Litecoin whilst they inserted an incompatible BTC address which they don't know how to alter so they can get their litecoin back. It's like buying an AMD motherboard and then buying an intel CPU. Not the store's fault they sold you the products.

Let's stop being mean to OP - but there are no ways for you to get user coins back. If you can afford to send out transactions, it should be pretty easy to reimburse those people who placed large orders, shouldn't it be?

Is canceling unable to restore it? if it really can't, I don't think I can ever go back because the cryptocurrency system can't be restored as expected. so when sending to bitcoin it must remain to the bitcoin address and if there is an error it will not be able to return

Sorry mate, your litecoins are gone forever. You should fix your ATM machine immediately! Because it is a big issue and for this, you can lose a huge amount of money. As the Litecoin and Bitcoin are a totally different coin. So, Once you send Litecoin to any Bitcoin wallet it's mean your LTC is gone.

Is there any flow in your machine with send the litecoin to the Bitcoin address ?
This seems very strange. You customers may be very angry with you when they come to know about it.  :o
As far as I know it is impossible to recover your money if it is sent to a wrong address or to the wrong network.

I have friends of mine who send bitcoin to a bitcoincash wallet and i can tell you for sure he lost all his money! Sorry for that.

The system should have confirmation if really want to do the process or cancel because once it is being sent there is no possibility for turning it back. There s no recovery on the blockchain wherein we have to be careful on every address we used before it turn into nothing. It is not compatible for all wallet.

I don't got it. How could The machine just sends Litecoin to bitcoin address??  Is it really possible when cryto technology is much more advance nowadays. Well if so really happened, there is nothing to do without fixing your ATM machine. Cause there is no recovery option at all. Feel sorry for that incedent  :'(

First off  you gave them 2 choices  when only one will work.

So you lose  the money and will have to pay all the people  that  did this on your machine.


Second the company that sold you the gear  fucked up  and you may be able to get them to cover your losses after you pay your customers.


Yeah it sucks.... 


Here is the deal 1 machine 1 coin btc and that is it. Clearly label the machine as cash to btc.

How bad are the losses you mention 1000 usd    transactions  which is at least 2000 + some small ones.


try and have atm removed  and replaced with a btc only machine.  so it does not happen again.

For basic P2PKH addresses (Bitcoin '1', Litecoin 'L') it should be possible to recover the funds by copying the private key from the Bitcoin wallet to the Litecoin wallet.

The catch is that keys in Wallet Interchange Format (WIF) will look very different between the two networks, even though the decoded raw bytes are the same. You (or rather, the recipient, the customer) would need to export from Bitcoin, convert Bitcoin to Litecoin WIF, and import into Litecoin.

This is what the same private key looks like on both Bitcoin and Litecoin:

BITCOIN
Private key hex: 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
Private key WIF: KwDiBf89QgGbjEhKnhXJuH7LrciVrZi3qYjgd9M7rFU73sVHnoWn
Public key hex: 0279be667ef9dcbbac55a06295ce870b07029bfcdb2dce28d959f2815b16f81798
HASH160 hex: 751e76e8199196d454941c45d1b3a323f1433bd6
Address: 1BgGZ9tcN4rm9KBzDn7KprQz87SZ26SAMH

LITECOIN
Private key hex: 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
Private key WIF: T33ydQRKp4FCW5LCLLUB7deioUMoveiwekdwUwyfRDeGZm76aUjV
Public key hex: 0279be667ef9dcbbac55a06295ce870b07029bfcdb2dce28d959f2815b16f81798
HASH160 hex: 751e76e8199196d454941c45d1b3a323f1433bd6
Address: LVuDpNCSSj6pQ7t9Pv6d6sUkLKoqDEVUnJ

Note that only the WIF and Address fields differ, and that's only because they are in base58check format, which uses a prefix specifically for the network. Internally to each client they are using exactly the same numbers, regardless of the network.

Script for sending to Bitcoin address 1BgGZ9tcN4rm9KBzDn7KprQz87SZ26SAMH: DUP HASH160 PUSHDATA(20)[751e76e8199196d454941c45d1b3a323f1433bd6] EQUALVERIFY CHECKSIG

Script for sending to Litecoin address LVuDpNCSSj6pQ7t9Pv6d6sUkLKoqDEVUnJ: DUP HASH160 PUSHDATA(20)[751e76e8199196d454941c45d1b3a323f1433bd6] EQUALVERIFY CHECKSIG

(They're identical. Both addresses map to the hex sequence 751e76e8199196d454941c45d1b3a323f1433bd6 internally.)

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It's probably also worth considering that some of the more tech savvy customers may have already 'recovered' their funds on the Litecoin network, even after complaining to the OP and being compensated in Bitcoin.

Sounds like you want to pass them onto the ATM companies support team.  Their machine screwed up, so it is their fault.

I don't think it will be easily returned it has entered the wrong address. and maybe you can try to re-learn from experience if the address of each type of coin has been set according to the smart coin contract

He is the owner of the machine that’s why he is also concern about he’s costumers and maybe some of them don’t know what to do so he isn’t doing them a favor
And if we will put our feet on their shoes we can see the desperation so the owner is extending effort to do the move.and besides if owner don’t give them this favor who will do for them!?

But what you’ve said is a good answer towards OPs concern and hope there are still way to recover the floating coins in the air.

so in basic terms, if you send bitcoin to a litecoin address, its possible you can use the bitcoin private key to generate the litecoin wallet with the bitcoin in it? but you still wont get your bitcoin back?? you will now have some litecoin.
or am i reading that wrong? or could you then sign the litecoin wallet and send your bitcoin back to yourself? will the core allow that?

it really seems that when altcoins were created, they core devs should have patched in a check that would make invalid tx's fail and those coins bounced back..

Well, I guess its 100% there's no chance for you to recover it. Because I always saw in the exchange that every time you deposit or withdraw there is a reminders often there that once you send it to different address it won't recover anymore, so same goes with you case mate.

The former is correct. A private key is just a sequence of 32 bytes, and a public key hash (which the address is derived from) is just a sequence of 20 bytes, so it's up to the client software to check that the key and address are associated with the correct network. As stated above, internally the representation does not use anything identifying the network; it's only when base58 encoding a "human readable" address or WIF privkey that the network prefix is added.

This is explained (in some detail) at https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses . Steps 4 to 9 are solely for converting the internal 20 byte public key hash to base58 format, which does denote the correct network, but the client (and blockchain) only use the result of step 3, which has no network information attached.

This means it's possible to use the same private key across multiple coins/blockchains (a brainwallet is one example of doing this) but of course the funds cannot be sent across blockchains.


Bitcoin Core (and most likely Litecoin Core) does check that the address is valid when you attempt to send funds, so something else in the ATM system is decoding that address without verifying it is valid for the currency the user has selected. Since the ATM supports multiple currencies, it probably uses custom software. Or maybe it just phones home to a backend that does everything. Either way, it seems something is blindly decoding the receive address without checking that the first byte matches the network the user has selected.

May I know how much amount losses because of this tragedy?
Seems quite difficult to recover their funds.
Maybe you need to contact the Litecoin team, this is the best thing to help to recover their funds

For new people it can be very confusing which coin to buy. Litecoin and Bitcoin actually have 2 very different names at least. But there were some bitcoin services (i think on bitcoin.com) where you were given the option to buy Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Core. And most people selected the first one and had it sent to a Bitcoin address instead of BCH address. I am sure they did a software update and the prefix is different to avoid confusion but initially right after the fork many people had this issue.

Same with the Bitcoin ATM. Most people might get confused, pick the wrong coin and get it sent to the wrong network. Hence like others have said here, you should put in a check for this to prevent it from happening or you will get angry customers all the time.

If you study this situation deeply enough, it becomes clear that all the funds that you sent to the wallet address, which is related to a completely different coin, this can only mean one thing.  You will lose everything that you sent.  This is the case with erc 20 coins, the situation is much better, but not with altcoin and bitcoin.

Are people even reading replies in this thread? I stated above exactly how the funds can be recovered.