Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Is bitcoin is the new era of currency?
by
deisik
on 09/01/2017, 14:51:52 UTC
Yeah and the biggest advantage is the non reversible nature of this currency. Because every day I listen from my friends that someone scammed them by sending hacked funds, reversed a transaction and a lot more, with bitcoins all these possibilities get eliminated.

It does come at a cost though

Bitcoin transactions are irreversible but this pretty much means that if you send your coins to a wrong address you can safely kiss them goodbye. And what's more regrettable, you can just as well lose your coins by sending them to a non-existing address. And when someone creates this address (which is highly unlikely but still), he will be greatly surprised to see a bonus awaiting him. Does any desktop wallet have a feature of checking for the address existence or it simply makes no sense because most addresses are used only once? 

I thought bitcoin itself had a protocol for checking if the sending address is valid, and if you mistype the address the coins don't send?

A Bitcoin address can't contain certain symbols which could be mistaken for other symbols (e.g. 0 and O), and that should be checked by the wallet you are using, though I didn't try it out personally so I basically don't know what will happen. I guess if a transaction with an invalid address (not to be confused with a non-existing address) somehow hits the network (say you send it manually), it will end up rejected by the miners...

Someone more knowledgeable may want to chime in on this