I'll take a post from the signature thread here too:
The Note Public Address is in fact the Legacy Bitcoin address corresponding to the private key you saved, the only difference is that every '1' is changed to 'ww' so again, you can easily distinguish a Whirlwind Note from a Bitcoin address.
Allow me to nitpick: you mean
the first '1', not
every '1'.
You are right apologies for the confusion.
It should work either way though, actually you don't even need to change 1 to ww and Pay to Note will still work. We tried to make it as hard as possible to make an actual mistake that would result in loss of funds for a user. As long as you have the private key you have nothing to worry about. For example if you want to use Pay to Note you can send to either one of these 3 addresses and it would still work:
18Sf8x3GBUiTxg55RQEzynf2Cdyy7F
1ihh
ww8Sf8x3GBUiTxg55RQEzynf2Cdyy7F
1ihh
18Sf8x3GBUiTxg55RQEzynf2Cdyy7F
wwihh
For 'on-chain' withdraws only the real Bitcoin address is accepted as valid, so only the first option from above.
Okay. This increased my confusion further. Let's say I am not a Bitcointalk user, and I am not a signature participant too. I am an average Joe from a Google search and want to mix my Bitcoin. How do I suppose to know that I have to replace that ww with 1? I mean, I did not find any explanation or any instruction regarding the address. I never saw a Bitcoin Address Start with ww, so I asked in the signature campaign thread.
@o_e_l_e_o explained perfectly, I would add that the
only way to make a Bitcoin deposit on Whirlwind is going through the deposit process on the website. (on the 'Create Note' tab generate a Note and select 'Yes' when asked 'Deposit now?', after you go to the next step and you will get the Bitcoin address where you're supposed to send your deposit)