Bitcoin wallet addresses … ‘1’ or ‘3’?
Published in
4 min readJul 5, 2021
In creating bitcoins, Satoshi created a P2PKH (Pay to Public Key Hash) address. These addresses are used to identify the wallet to be paid and links to the public key of the owner. Basically, when a payer signs a transaction with their private key, this signature can be checked again the wallet address.
The original addresses started with a ‘1’, such as [here]:
In order to support the sending of bitcoins to and from multiple addresses, Bitcoin was upgraded with SegWit (defined in BIP141). The wallet address then integrates the pay to witness public key hash (Pay to script hash — P2SH). These addresses start with a ‘3’, such as [here]:
If you are interested, here is the first transaction to use the P2SH address [here]:
