Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Merits 26 from 3 users
Re: Difference between SegWit addresses
by
DannyHamilton
on 03/11/2017, 13:19:20 UTC
⭐ Merited by Mitchell (20) ,OmegaStarScream (5) ,Financisto (1)
So the number of possible addresses is reduced using bech32?

No.

The old P2PKH addresses that started with a 1 were typically 34 characters long.

The new bech32 addresses are typically 42 characters long.

Also...

The first character of the old addresses indicated the address type, and the last 6 characters were part of the checksum, leaving approximately 27 characters of base58 key hash data. This leaves enough room for more than:
1.46 × 1048 possible addresses


With a bech32 P2WPKH address, the first 3 characters indicate the address type, and the last 6 characters are the checksum, leaving 33 characters of base32 key hash data.  This leaves enough room for more than:
1.46 × 1048 possible addresses

Since the public key hash is only a 160 bit value, there are only 1.46 × 1048 possible addresses.  Therefore, BOTH address formats have enough room for ALL possible currently valid addresses.