Just lost $4000 because of addresses starting with "bc1p"

[Guessti]

What is a Bitcoin address that starts with B?
You can identify the type of a bitcoin address by looking at the first letters of it. If it starts with "1", it's a legacy address. If it starts with "3", it's a P2SH address. If it starts with "bc1q", it's a native segwit and if the first 4 letters are "bc1p", it's a taproot address.Oct 18, 2021

Whoever decided this was a good idea is a MORON. (and me too now but damn)

Did you even think about people who verify address by looking at first few letters/numbers of address?

I usually do both, the first few and last few but I mainly always went by the first few digits to make sure I didn't accidently copy/paste wrong address.

Thanks a lot whoever thought it was a good idea to have "bc1p" on every address.  

[Charles-Tim]

You can identify the type of a bitcoin address by looking at the first letters of it. If it starts with "1", it's a legacy address. If it starts with "3", it's a P2SH address. If it starts with "bc1q", it's a native segwit and if the first 4 letters are "bc1p", it's a taproot address.

Pay-to-tap-root is a modified version of native segwit.

Did you even think about people who verify address by looking at first few letters/numbers of address?

I do check the first few, middle and last few characters which I prefer.

I usually do both, the first few and last few but I mainly always went by the first few digits to make sure I didn't accidently copy/paste wrong address.

There is possibility that two or more different addresses would start with the same first few characters and ended to be different addresses.

1EEoqxSat3 followed by the rest of an address can also be 1EEoqxSat3 followed by the rest of another address with less then a months worth of GPU computing power. And with all the GPU rigs not doing much after ETH went PoS there are a lot of them out there not doing much.

[mk4]

So.. how did you lose your money exactly? You sent the funds to the wrong address because of the first 4 characters?

If so, sorry for your loss — but maybe you need to be more careful when sending that high of an amount. Always remember that taking extra 5-10 seconds doublechecking the address wouldn't hurt.

[rat03gopoh]

Whoever decided this was a good idea is a MORON.

Did you even think about people who verify address by looking at first few letters/numbers of address?

Because this is the easiest verification method, after a while people don't do it because they keep shortening the process (underestimating).

I usually do both, the first few and last few but I mainly always went by the first few digits to make sure I didn't accidently copy/paste wrong address.

Thanks a lot whoever thought it was a good idea to have "bc1p" on every address.  

My years in this field have never once thought of creating this type of address, are you a developer? Afaik, the taproot address isn't yet active on the bitcoin network. So it will be good news for you if it becomes active one day and your previous transactions will also be recorded on the blockchain. cmiiw

[Guessti]

Whoever decided this was a good idea is a MORON.

Did you even think about people who verify address by looking at first few letters/numbers of address?

Because this is the easiest verification method, after a while people don't do it because they keep shortening the process (underestimating).

I usually do both, the first few and last few but I mainly always went by the first few digits to make sure I didn't accidently copy/paste wrong address.

Thanks a lot whoever thought it was a good idea to have "bc1p" on every address.  

My years in this field have never once thought of creating this type of address, are you a developer? Afaik, the taproot address isn't yet active on the bitcoin network. So it will be good news for you if it becomes active one day and your previous transactions will also be recorded on the blockchain. cmiiw

Exchanges/payments apps like CoinBase/CashApp/Venmo all using these now I noticed.

I never once sent to wrong address before now.. I haven't been doing too much with crypto the past year or so.. but DAMN I can't believe someone thought this was a good idea. :/

[BlackBoss_]

What is a Bitcoin address that starts with B?

Only B is not enough. Other shitcoins can have their addresses start with B too.

You can identify the type of a bitcoin address by looking at the first letters of it. If it starts with "1", it's a legacy address. If it starts with "3", it's a P2SH address. If it starts with "bc1q", it's a native segwit and if the first 4 letters are "bc1p", it's a taproot address.Oct 18, 2021[/i]

Address types:
- Legacy: start with 1
- Nested Segwit: start with 3
- Native Segwit (also called as Bech32): start with bc1q
- Taproot (also called as Bech32m, a variant of Bech32): start with bc1p

Bech32 adoption
Invoice address
List of address prefixes

Did you even think about people who verify address by looking at first few letters/numbers of address?

I usually do both, the first few and last few but I mainly always went by the first few digits to make sure I didn't accidently copy/paste wrong address.

How to lose your Bitcoins with CTRL-C CTRL-V
Why do you not check all characters of one address for each transaction?

Does it take 1 hour to check a full address from first to last character?

[Charles-Tim]

Afaik, the taproot address isn't yet active on the bitcoin network. So it will be good news for you if it becomes active one day and your previous transactions will also be recorded on the blockchain. cmiiw

You can pay with/to pay-to-tap-root addresses to/from any other type of addresses. All would to be recorded on blockchain. Which means P2TR addresses are valid.

[crwth]

I’m sorry that you had to experience that because of a single mistake that you didn’t check everything on the address. If you were to send it to the wrong address, wouldn’t it have a different ending too? I think you should be able to check it if you have monitored and see what the address you were sent to is because it’s a considerable amount.

Being paranoid, sometimes is better to doublecheck, and make sure that you would receive the money.

[Guessti]

I’m sorry that you had to experience that because of a single mistake that you didn’t check everything on the address. If you were to send it to the wrong address, wouldn’t it have a different ending too? I think you should be able to check it if you have monitored and see what the address you were sent to is because it’s a considerable amount.

Being paranoid, sometimes is better to doublecheck, and make sure that you would receive the money.

Yeah this is literally the first time I ever did this and I been using Bitcoin since 2013

TBH I mostly started off always just checking the first few, then I later in life I decided I would USUALLY check the last few as well.

Never had an issue until someone decided its a good idea to have addresses created with the same first few charatcers.

Like who the hell actually thought that was a good idea? Cmon I'm not the only one who would do this.

Its whatever it still looks stupid to me, having a bunch of Bitcoin addresses having the same first few characters? Jesus man that is dumb.

I'm dumb too and thats the point.

When I was a kid I used to have the first generation Nintendo DS.

The Pokemon Diamond game was the one I had, and I also had an Action Replay.



The Pokemon cartridge would go in the female part, and the male part would go into the Nintendo DS.

If I wanted say:

x999 Rare Candies

or

Lvl 99 Arceus on next wild grass encounter

then that cheat had a specific line of code you had to enter into the Action Replay software on your computer before putting it into the DS.

the cheat codes looked like this, and they could easily be found online back then.



Now,

If I entered a code, and it didn't work when I booted up the game, almost 99% of the time it's because I made a typo in the line.

All it takes is one character to fuck up.

Before I send btc, before I receive btc, usually anything that has to do with verifying addresses...
I scan the fuck out of the address with my eyeballs sometimes until they start to hurt or I'm certain malware hasn't changed the address on me.

I'm old enough to remember GameShark for the GameBoy color:)

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

[Poker Player]

I'm with the OP, I don't know who came up with it but it doesn't seem like a good idea. I usually for small payments, like $50 I look over the characters, and I think that if at some point I make a mistake or get scammed by not checking, I will learn my lesson and from then on I will look at it more carefully. With $4k I would have been more careful, though.

[wxa7115]

What is a Bitcoin address that starts with B?
You can identify the type of a bitcoin address by looking at the first letters of it. If it starts with "1", it's a legacy address. If it starts with "3", it's a P2SH address. If it starts with "bc1q", it's a native segwit and if the first 4 letters are "bc1p", it's a taproot address.Oct 18, 2021

Whoever decided this was a good idea is a MORON. (and me too now but damn)

Did you even think about people who verify address by looking at first few letters/numbers of address?

I usually do both, the first few and last few but I mainly always went by the first few digits to make sure I didn't accidently copy/paste wrong address.

Thanks a lot whoever thought it was a good idea to have "bc1p" on every address.  

It is never nice to lose such an amount of money over such mistake and it is natural that you are mad about it, but since nothing can be done about it maybe it is better to think about possible ways to avoid the same thing happening again.

Many years ago I did the same as you and I only verified the first and last characters of the address I wanted to send a transaction, but since long ago I have not felt secure even with this method and instead I check all the characters, it is slightly more time consuming but it is preferable to do this and lose a little bit of time than to take any risk when such a high amount of money is at stake.

[Maus0728]

The four address formats used in the bitcoin mainnet are all intended to be compatible with one another, so you can send and receive bitcoin using two different formats.

The issue here is that it is not whether the bitcoin address you are sending to has a different format but rather with the wallet's capability to send to or receive from bech32m-type bitcoin addresses.

But yeah, that's a lot of tuition fee for a person who is in the industry for a while.
- https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption

[pooya87]

You didn't say HOW you lost money though!

If the destination created a Taproot address for you and showed it to you so that you can copy it, that means the destination (whether it was your wallet or an exchange or anything else) supported that new address type and any coins sent to that address is already in the destination and can be used.

If the source (your wallet, exchange account, etc.) that you pasted the address in accepted it without throwing any exceptions and successfully sent the transaction, that means it too supported Taproot and successfully sent a valid transaction to the destination YOU gave it.

So I ask again, how did you lose the coins?

[BlackBoss_]

So I ask again, how did you lose the coins?

OP can lose his bitcoins only if he did sent his bitcoins to a wrong receiving address.

Because it is possible to receive bitcoin in all custody and self custody wallets with all transactions from any address types. Hence, it is impossible to not receive his bitcoins if he sent it to any receiving address he has even on centralized exchanges, casinos or merchants.

On centralized platforms, problems are for sending like if they don't support Bech32, Bech32m for withdrawal, we can not withdraw our bitcoins to these types of address. The technical problem is for Bech32 and Bech32m address type only. Nowadays, no issue for transactions between Legacy (1) and Nested Segwit address (3) types on centralized platforms. If any platform has that problem, they scam customers.

[Kakmakr]

My take on this is....

A person or group of developers start a project, thinking that it is going to be the industry standard.... and then competition start to pop up... and then people fight over which project should be the industry standard. 

This happened with old Video machines ...(the battle between VHS & Betamax) ==> https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/vhs-beat-betamax

[pooya87]

So I ask again, how did you lose the coins?

OP can lose his bitcoins only if he did sent his bitcoins to a wrong receiving address.

Because it is possible to receive bitcoin in all custody and self custody wallets with all transactions from any address types. Hence, it is impossible to not receive his bitcoins if he sent it to any receiving address he has even on centralized exchanges, casinos or merchants.

On centralized platforms, problems are for sending like if they don't support Bech32, Bech32m for withdrawal, we can not withdraw our bitcoins to these types of address. The technical problem is for Bech32 and Bech32m address type only. Nowadays, no issue for transactions between Legacy (1) and Nested Segwit address (3) types on centralized platforms. If any platform has that problem, they scam customers.

The only way that the address could have been wrong is if the destination (I still don't know if destination was OP's wallet or exchange) was using a flawed software to produce the wrong address.
As for Bech32/m differences, any software that doesn't support the newer type would reject it not accept it as valid since the checksum algorithm is different. So it should not have been possible to send to this address in first place if the software didn't support it already.

[rat03gopoh]

Afaik, the taproot address isn't yet active on the bitcoin network. So it will be good news for you if it becomes active one day and your previous transactions will also be recorded on the blockchain. cmiiw

You can pay with/to pay-to-tap-root addresses to/from any other type of addresses. All would to be recorded on blockchain. Which means P2TR addresses are valid.

So in the op's case, supposing he generated that taproot address with the PK, actually he can now recover his bitcoins without compromising the originality after exiting the taproot address and it's valid?

[DdmrDdmr]

Unless you’re holding back due to privacy concerns, as stated before on this thread, you haven’t made the circumstances clear enough for people to uncerstand exactly where the problem you’ve had resides (i.e. implicated types of wallets, expected origin address type, expected recipient address type, address changed due to malware, or else).

Checkout the "Receive to P2TR" column here to see if that may have something to do with it.

[Guessti]

--snip--

Address types:
- Legacy: start with 1
- Nested Segwit: start with 3
- Native Segwit (also called as Bech32): start with bc1q
- Taproot (also called as Bech32m, a variant of Bech32): start with bc1p

Address starts with 3 can represent various things though, such as multi-signature address or any custom spending condition.

Thanks a lot whoever thought it was a good idea to have "bc1p" on every address.  

Check BIP 173.

I'm with the OP, I don't know who came up with it but it doesn't seem like a good idea.

Would you rather see address with prefix 4 (for segwit) or 5 (for taproot) instead which likely already used by altcoin? I've read bech32 specification, so i believe it's better option on long term.

I don't understand, what was the point of changing it or adding all this crap?

What the hell was wrong with just keeping addresses the way they were already?  

What is the purpose, I don't get it. 

[kryptqnick]

I am so sorry for your loss, it's a significant amount of money... Like Charles-Tim, I usually don't fully check the address but I check the first 3-4 characters and the last 3-4 characters to ensure I got the right one. I remember there used to be malware that targeted copy-paste and pasted the wrong address, sometimes even making it an approximation of the original in terms of the first few characters, which is why I always do the basic checking. I still don't fully understand how the op lost the money (was is copy-paste malware or copying a wrong address in the first place because the first few symbols were identical?), and I'm not sure if anything can be done to get the money back (probably not, unless you know to whom that address belongs and can reach out in any way).
As for what was wrong with old addresses, I believe Segwit was at least partially aiming to reduce transaction fees, and given how the fees have been for the last few years, I think it worked.