Topic: LTC sent to BTC adress (Read 2442 times)

Good for you. I once had the same with another coin (yeah stupid mistake), unfortuanetly I lost my coins. Luckily I learned my lesson and these days i avoid this by triple checking...

Good news . Bitfinex credited lost LTC today on my account. They were able to recover it. It passed just 8 days since I made a mistake.
So this bad experience ended well. Hope it will help someone. And I hope LTC team implement some kind of code so this cannot keep happening to users. Thanks Bitfinex for their professional service and all of you guys for helping me out.

I did. Waiting for them to get back to me...

If it has sent then nothing really BTC-e can do as they no longer control the coins. Best bet would be to contact bitfinex and explain the situation to them?

Its def sent. Yes my Finex BTC adress starts with 3. I will uptade this topic as soon as I know something. Hoping for the best.

Thanks for the answer
So, it's basically possible, but it's also quite normal the exchange will need a week to do this.

Yes. They would need to extract the raw private key as a 256 bit number and convert that to ltc wif in order to use it with any ltc wallet.

I've read this thread, and just have 1 question... I know it's a bit off-topic, but i really wanted to understand what is going on....

The OP created a BTC-multisig address in an exchange, and sent LTC to it (both BTC and LTC multisig addy's can start with a 3, so this was perfectly possible).

As far as i understand the technical part of bitcoin, the LTC tx stayed within the LTC blockchain, and is now residing in an LTC address without private key... Right?

The exchange has the private key for the BTC address, will this same private key also work for signing a LTC transaction???

Please read the thread before posting, it isn't even that long. If you actually read the thread, you should know that it is possible to do this and that op can't do much except to contact bitfinex support, which he has already done.

They can't be sent. It's not possible. You should demand btc-e for a refund.

Did they deduct the funds from your account?

I thought your payment bounces back straight away as soon as someone tries to confirm it. Even then, doesn't your wallet try to stop you, as all litecoin addresses start with L, and all bitcoin addresses start with 1? Surely your wallet will be smart enough to stop that

If the source is outdated, you should leave a comment and/or a downvote on the answer that is invalid (or request that someone do so if you have not yet obtained privileges there). In doing so, you would also help users whose initial search takes them there and not to this forum.

The problem is deeper than that. It would require a change to how LTC identifies multi sig addresses. AFAIK you cant just change that without risking all existing multi sig address, which is obviously not going to happen.

Or did they select the address for you? If thats the case Btce should change the addresses they have saved for Bitfinex.

Since they have the private keys it should be no issue though. They just need somone digging up the correct private keys and recreate the address.

Thx guys for the updates. Unfortunately it is sent from Btce to Bitfinex multisig adress. I contacted the support and they were  kind enough to tell me they will try to recover them and that it could take at least a week. We will see what happens, but there is at least little hope. There should def be some tool on every exchange that prevents this kind of user error.

Ok Mr. Hamilton. I will take note of your advice and update my knowledge base on the subject. I started in cryptocurrency with Litecoin back in 2013 and haven't used it since then.
I will leave it to the experts to answer more technically next time.
Excuse my confusing this matter.

You are wrong.  They both use a base58 representation of a 160 bit hash.  The number of characters is the same.  It will NOT necessarily "be rejected once it attempts to do 1st confirmation".


Then you need to update your knowledge base, because you are giving incorrect answers and misleading people.


Some do, but Litecoin has implemented multisig and in doing so they stupidly chose to use the same prefix byte as bitcoin.  Therefore when sending litecoins to a multisig address the address will start with a 3 and when sending bitcoins to a multisig address the address will also start with a 3.


Bitcoin addresses (and litecoin addresses) can have as many as 34 or as few as 25 characters.


Your source is outdated.  In repeating it you are simply spreading mis-information and making it likely that someone else will see your post and repeat the incorrect information in the future.  This is how confusion and bad information spread.  People repeat things they've read without first making sure that it's right, and then when the mistake is pointed out to them they don't bother cleaning up the mess they've made.

I was answering his question genuinely from my past experience when I started in litecoin.
My litecoin addresses did have L at the beginning and did have different amount of characters compared to my bitcoin addresses.

The reason I answered the way I did was from my cross referencing here:

Bitcoin and Litecoin use different prefix bytes; this is why most Bitcoin addresses start with 1, while most Litecoin addresses start with L.

When you use a Bitcoin client to try to send money to an address, it should perform a number of checks on that address. One of those checks would be the prefix byte. When it notices that the address doesn't have the correct prefix byte for Bitcoin, it should barf, complaining that you have specified an invalid address. It wouldn't try to create a transaction at all.

So for practical purposes, the answer to the question is "you can't do it".

The same applies if you try to send Litecoins to a Bitcoin address - the prefix byte would not match the Litecoin client's expectation, so it would reject the address and refuse to create a transaction.


In theory, if you somehow used a broken client that did not check the prefix byte, it might actually generate a transaction whose output specified the 160-bit hash of the public key corresponding to the Litecoin address (call this hash value H). The hash is the only part of the address that is actually used in creating a transaction. Since all possible 160-bit numbers are potentially valid hashes, there would be no way to tell that H had come from a Litecoin rather than a Bitcoin key, so this would be a valid Bitcoin transaction. (I got this wrong in a previous version of the answer.) The transaction could only be spent by a Bitcoin transaction, signed with a private key whose public key had the hash H.

Now I believe (though I am not completely sure) that Litecoin uses exactly the same ECDSA signature algorithms as Bitcoin. Therefore, if you (or someone else) has the private key for the Litecoin address, both Bitcoin and Litecoin should agree as to what the corresponding public key is, and agree that it has hash H. So in principle, the private key holder would be able to import this key into a Bitcoin wallet and use it to spend the coins sent to the Litecoin address by the broken client. (They couldn't import the key directly, again because the prefix byte would be wrong; but they could decode the base58-encoded Litecoin private key string, extract the 256-bit number which is the actual private key, prefix it with the appropriate Bitcoin prefix byte, recalculate the checksum, and re-encode the whole thing in base 58. The result would be suitable to import into a standard Bitcoin wallet.)

If I am wrong about this, and Bitcoin and Litecoin handle keys and signatures differently, then most likely there would be no feasible way to find a private key whose public key's hash (computed by Bitcoin's rules) was equal to H. In that case, the coins sent to that address would be lost forever.

Source :http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/16933/what-happens-if-you-send-bitcoin-to-a-litecoin-address

It's weird. I don't see BTC-e having any P2SH address (starting with 3) or LTC address starting with 3. If you do key in the BTC address into LTC wallet, it wouldn't be accepted, due to the difference in prefix (1 and L)

But yeah, it could be recovered if they have the private key of the BTC address.

Ok, you should contact the exchange. As long as they have the private key, they can go through the technical details and release your coins. Cross your fingers and hope that the exchange staff will be helpful. Good luck!

Why does this keep happening[1]?

Does your litcoin wallet not check the prefix or did you send to a multi sig addresses?

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/3c3o0b/help_have_sent_litecoin_to_a_bitfinex_bitcoin/



It can, the amount of charcters is not different.


Multisig addresses for BTC and LTC use the same prefix and thus you can use the same address for both coins.


see above


FTFY

Please for the love of god, do not post your guesses here. People come to tech support for help with their coins. Would you want someone to wildly guess what happend if you needed help? Because thats what this section will boil down if you keep spamming for your shitty signature here. Yes, I am mad. You risk someone elses coins here for a few satoshi.

This rant was probably out of line.