Question about sending bitcoin to litecoin address?

[Oshosondy]

What I thought before is that if bitcoin is sent to litecoin address or if litecoin is sent to bitcoin address, that the bitcoin or litecoin sent will be lost, until a friend told me it can still be recovered not long ago. Assuming I am having the private key to the address the bitcoin or litecoin is sent to, is it true I can recover back the bitcoin or litecoin sent.

To understand the question better
1. Can I recover bitcoin sent to litecoin address if I have the litecoin private key that generates the address?
2. Can I recover litecoin sent to bitcoin address if I had the bitcoin private key that generates the address?

[1714134942]

1714134942

[1714134942]

1714134942

[1714134942]

1714134942

[jackg]

2 ONLY i think.

There's something in the litecoin schematic I think that means everyone who was airdropped the funds in 2011 can claim using a bitcoin address and private key pair but the litecoin addresses changed to identify them and for other purposes. I'm not fully certain on this but I thought that's how the implementation worked...

[HCP]

Basically, yes. You should be able to recover the coins sent "cross-chain", but only if you have the appropriate private keys.

After all, private keys are really just very large, random numbers... and, as far as I'm aware, both BTC and LTC use the same "range" of private keys. The problems arise because the overlap in Bitcoin and Litecoin addresses was in the "P2SH" addresses if I'm not mistaken... the ones that start with a "3"... whether or not you have the appropriate private key for that type of address is another story!


You can have a play here: https://www.bitaddress.org/
and here: https://liteaddress.org/

Click the "wallet details" tab, and use this private key: DD4024E95D3171908BF3F20F4CE684F4D09C1D2C08A6047FFC1842CF1E157D81

Bitcoin:




Litecoin:




Same public keys generated from the same private key, but obviously different "addresses" due to the address encoding using different network bytes etc. Also, the "WIF" format keys will be different as well, but the underlying hex private key is the same:

Bitcoin:



Litecoin:


(NOTE: how the litecoin code has been copied and says incorrectly that WIF should start with a "5", "L or K"? )

[oliviarobert]

If you send BTC to the LTC address or the opposite, as you will have the same private key stored in the BTC seed, and you paste the same private key in the LTC wallet to get the coins.

The same hash functions is not shared by bitcoin and litecoins.

[pooya87]

If you send BTC to the LTC address or the opposite, as you will have the same private key stored in the BTC seed, and you paste the same private key in the LTC wallet to get the coins.

since the version byte using in the the encoding of private keys are different, the private key (WIF) of one coin can not be entered in the other coin's wallet.

The same hash functions is not shared by bitcoin and litecoins.

wrong. LTC is a copy of bitcoin and only thing they changed are the hash algorithm used in mining and block time (difficulty). the rest including hash algorithms used in addresses are the same.