Re: Is bitcoin is the new era of currency?

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

I think the purpose of some of the characters inside the bitcoin address are being used for the purpose of checking errors (checksum). But I'm not familiar on which exact characters are being used for confirming the address is indeed valid and isn't just a simple address with wrong of missing character.