When every one of us entered the world of crypto, the first thing we were introduced to were wallets. While most of us probably imagined a wallet as a simple and cool app, it is in reality pretty basic and it consists of two large strings of numbers and characters: one is a private key and one is a public key.
We won’t go into details about cryptography and how private and public key works, but you can read all about it here.
Simplified, when you own a pair of private and public keys, you can ensure that:
- The transaction was really sent by you: you encrypt it with a private key and the public can use your public key to decrypt the transaction.
- The transaction was really meant for you: the sender encrypts the transaction with your public key and only you can decrypt it with your private key.
Hence, you must never share your private key - always just a public key.
To help all newcomers to the crypto and crypto mining world better understand which wallet address they must use, we have introduced a new tool called wallet address validator.
You can select a coin and paste the address to validate it. Here are some examples of common mistakes. Pools sometimes detect these mistakes and drop the connection or reply with an unauthorized error.
❌ Using a private ETH address for mining on ETH pool
Private ETH address starts with 0x but has a length of 62 chars instead of 42 chars.
❌ Using a BTC address for mining on ETH pool
BTC address is entirely different from ETH address.
❌ Using a random address you find in your wallet provider for mining on ETH pool
Any other address that doesn’t start with 0x and has 42 chars won’t work.
❌ Using special characters in your address for mining on ETH pool
Any other address that doesn’t start with 0x and has 42 chars won’t work.
✅ Using a public ETH address for mining on ETH pool
Public ETH address starts with 0x and has a length of 42 chars.
⚠️ Important: The tool will try to validate the syntax of your address and is unable to actually confirm if a specific address exists or belongs to someone. Regardless of the results of this tool, you must always double-check that you are sending/receiving coins to an existing address that you actually own.
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