What is Split Wallet on www.bitaddress.org ?

[User365]

I recently discovered split address on www.bitaddress.org, but I am not sure what this actually should be.

Basically you have one public adress and can choose how much "shares" (I assume those are priv keys, they look like it) are generated and how much of those are required to send from the address.

BUT, the public address is f.e. 14DMsSty9S6M51Bxh3X2ZiFhRvdfNhXAjV, why is that? I thought multisig adressess always start with a 3? Is the 3 at the beginning only optional?

[krishnapramod]

I recently discovered split address on www.bitaddress.org, but I am not sure what this actually should be.

Basically you have one public adress and can choose how much "shares" (I assume those are priv keys, they look like it) are generated and how much of those are required to send from the address.

BUT, the public address is f.e. 14DMsSty9S6M51Bxh3X2ZiFhRvdfNhXAjV, why is that? I thought multisig adressess always start with a 3? Is the 3 at the beginning only optional?

As the name suggests, split wallet splits the private key into different shares. It is an older version of multi-sig. You can share the different parts with different people and later based on the minimum share threshold needed to combine, different shares can be combined to get the whole private key. Yeah it does not start with 3, but still valid. I would not recommend using bitaddress. Instead of using split wallet, just generate a multi-sig address.

[DannyHamilton]

As the name suggests, split wallet splits the private key into different shares.

Correct.  It is still 1 private key, but that key is split up into pieces.  You have to have enough pieces to reassemble the original single private key in order to spend any bitcoins.  Once you've reassembled the single private key you could import it and use it just like any other single private key address.

It is an older version of multi-sig.

Incorrect.

Transactions that make use of the address to receive bitcoins will still require only a SINGLE signature from the SINGLE private key that is reassembled from the pieces.  Since it doesn't require multiple signatures, it is NOT multi-sig.

You can share the different parts with different people and later based on the minimum share threshold needed to combine, different shares can be combined to get the whole private key.

Correct.  Or you could store the pieces in multiple locations, and later based on the minimum share threshold needed to combine, different shares can be combined to get the whole private key.

[Muhammed Zakir]

You might want to read https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=826374.0.

  -snip-
BUT, the public address is f.e. 14DMsSty9S6M51Bxh3X2ZiFhRvdfNhXAjV, why is that? I thought multisig adressess always start with a 3? Is the 3 at the beginning only optional?

Address starting with 1 is pay-to-pubkey-hash (P2PKH) and address starting with 3 is pay-to-script-hash (P2SH). You can't interchange 1 & 3 or any other letter in an address. It will result in an entirely different address than yours or end up with an invalid(unusable) address.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1064545.msg11410590#msg11410590