I am installing a mobile wallet and it ask me what type of address I want to use, I want to try and use a segwit address but is there a risk that my coins will be lost if I try to transfer fund from an exchange if they dont support it, or if I want to transfer coins from my segwit address to a legacy one.
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There are, broadly, three types of addresses in use at the moment:
- P2PKH - Pay to public key hash addresses start with a
1, and should be accepted by essentially any service in the Bitcoin ecosystem - P2SH - Pay to script hash addresses are commonly used for multisig, but as of the segwit activation, they are also used for wrapped segwit addresses. These start with a
3. In the wrapped segwit version, you get the advantage of lower fees, while still being able to send to the address from nearly all services. - Bech32 addresses - Starting with a
bc1, these are also known as native segwit addresses, and offer the greatest savings in fees. However, a sizable number of services do not support withdrawals to these addresses.
Generally, P2SH segwit addresses offer the best of both worlds at the moment.
When sending coins to a service, your choice of address does not matter. It only plays a role when receiving coins.
Raghav Sood
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2Worth mentioning, re: *"When sending coins to a service, your choice of address does not matter."* -- it doesn't matter as far as them being able to receive the transaction, but it *does* matter in terms of how much you pay in tx fees. Segwit addresses (P2SH or Bech32) get a discount when spending. For quick reference: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/62053/how-do-transaction-costs-compare-between-bech32-addresses-and-legacy-bitcoin-add – chytrik Oct 27 '19 at 23:35