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Board Beginners & Help
Re: is bitcoin address the same as Public key ?
by
exstasie
on 27/12/2017, 23:49:56 UTC
is bitcoin address the same as Public key in my wallet's ?

thanks for any help i need it, i have tried to google this but did not understand this.

Not exactly. See this article on the Bitcoin Wiki, specifically the section titled "How to create Bitcoin Address."

Bitcoin uses public-key cryptography. A private key is used to sign transactions, and the public key verifies that signatures are valid. For each "Bitcoin address" in your wallet, a public/private keypair is generated. Specifically, the address is a hash of the associated public key:

Quote
A Bitcoin address is a 160-bit hash of the public portion of a public/private ECDSA keypair.

So this private key --
Quote
18E14A7B6A307F426A94F8114701E7C8E774E7F9A47E2C2035DB29A206321725

-- corresponds with this public key --
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0450863AD64A87AE8A2FE83C1AF1A8403CB53F53E486D8511DAD8A04887E5B23522CD470243453A 299FA9E77237716103ABC11A1DF38855ED6F2EE187E9C582BA6

-- which goes through five rounds of hashing, has a checksum added, and is converted into a base58 string to produce this Bitcoin address:
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16UwLL9Risc3QfPqBUvKofHmBQ7wMtjvM