Sent some btc into a black hole

[Gavin Andresen]

D'oh!  I was running a -testnet bitcoind....

Never mind.

[pirateat40]

D'oh!  I was running a -testnet bitcoind....

Never mind.

hehe, no worries you have enough on your plate.

[Maged]

(...)

Seriously unlucky if true.

Please share the correct and incorrect address.

Seriously unlucky? Why's that?

Correct: 1AYSPTVt8WytG12Kz9guUpXjwAMFZG9CJh
Incorrect: 1AYSPTVt8WytG12Kz9guUpXjeAMFb7AX2K

After looking thorougly at both addresses, looks like I accidentally took the end of one address in my addressbook, and used it in the end of the incorrect address. Silly me.

Wait a second. Just figured something out. I'm absolutely sure I typed in that last part correct now that I think back. I remember typing in 9CJh at the end. I think I messed up where the "e" is supposed to be a "w" and my client must've tried to correct it! I'm using the electrum client. I'll talk to the developer about this.

There's your problem:

Code:

def bc_address_to_hash_160(addr):
    bytes = b58decode(addr, 25)
    return bytes[1:21]

What's terrible about this is that the checking code is already implemented in DecodeBase58Check. I suspect that this was a simple oversight, since it'd take only a few minutes to fix this.

[ThomasV]

my bad, the bug was in Electrum. I just fixed it and released a new version.

[Atheros]

Bytecoin has mentioned that the checksum doesn't work as well as you would expect.

How could it not?

https://en.bitcoin.it/w/images/en/9/9b/PubKeyToAddr.png
If one screws up the base58 address at all, wouldn't that mean that the 25-byte binary address is different?

[theymos]

How could it not?

https://en.bitcoin.it/w/images/en/9/9b/PubKeyToAddr.png
If one screws up the base58 address at all, wouldn't that mean that the 25-byte binary address is different?

I'm not familiar with the details, but here's a quote:

This may be an appropriate thread to mention that the the "checksum" at the end of an address does not effectively prevent single character errors or transpositions.

For instance https://blockexplorer.com/search/1ByteCoin shows that

Code:

1ByteCoinAddressesMatch1kpCWNXmHKW
1ByteCoinAddressesMatch1kpCxNXmHKW

are both valid addresses even though they only differ by one character.

Similarly, the valid addresses

Code:

1ByteCoinAddressesMatchcNN781jjwLY
1ByteCoinAddressesMatchcNN718jjwLY

only differ by one transposition.

ByteCoin

[btc_artist]

i hope in the future they will Re-mine the coins lost in the black hole

Maybe if they were categorically proven to be invalid addresses.