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Topic: Seeing the same recieve address on an altcoin. (Read 497 times)

legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1280
May Bitcoin be touched by his Noodly Appendage
Don't all coins have their own prefix in the address? Like BTC starts with 1, LTC with L and so on? Or is this prefix not considered while deriving keys?

if both coins share the same prefix, then yes.
Even if not the prefix

Is the prefix missed out in calculation then?
Yes
Where you send the coins isn't the address but the hash160 of the public key (ie step 3: 010966776006953D5567439E5E39F86A0D273BEE in the wiki example)
The prefix is only added in step 4

See https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2343066
sr. member
Activity: 308
Merit: 250
Don't all coins have their own prefix in the address? Like BTC starts with 1, LTC with L and so on? Or is this prefix not considered while deriving keys?

if both coins share the same prefix, then yes.
Even if not the prefix

Is the prefix missed out in calculation then?
legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1280
May Bitcoin be touched by his Noodly Appendage
if both coins share the same prefix, then yes.
Even if not the same prefix
member
Activity: 107
Merit: 10
Don't all coins have their own prefix in the address? Like BTC starts with 1, LTC with L and so on? Or is this prefix not considered while deriving keys?
legendary
Activity: 980
Merit: 1000
if both coins share the same prefix, then yes.

such an event is almost statistically impossible. you're more likely to win the lottery 10 times in a row.
sr. member
Activity: 308
Merit: 250
If for example, I noticed someone using terracoin had the same receive address as my bitcoin one, could I use my bitcoin private key on the terracoin network to spend all of that person's coins? Surely this could work as they both use the same algorithm to derive the public key from the private one.

Seems like quite a big security flaw, although ridiculously unlikely to happen, it could..
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