What if I enter the wrong address of a bitcoin wallet?
What happens to bitcoins that were sent to the wrong bitcoin wallet address? Is it possible to return the “lost” bitcoins? What to do if you entered the correct wallet address but the cryptocurrency did not reach the recipient? Read about the actions to be taken in these cases in this article.
Below are the three most likely scenarios.
Bitcoin address typo
If you entered the address of the addresser’s Bitcoin wallet manually, it is likely that you made a typo in some part of it. There is a difference between an invalid address and an incorrect address.
All bitcoin wallets or bitcoin clients check the validity of the entered wallet address you want to transfer bitcoins to. Since the checksum is 32 characters, the probability that you enter an incorrect address, which after decoding will be incorrect but valid, is approximately 1 to 4.3 billion. So, in 4,294,967,295 cases out of 4,294,967,296 a typo will create an address that is both incorrect and invalid. When such an address is decoded into PubKeyHash, it will not produce the correct checksum. Therefore, the error will be noticed by the client/wallet and the transaction will not be created.
In a practically unbelievable case of entering an address with a typo, yet still a valid address, your funds will indeed be lost. Only a person who holds a private key to this address can get them. Considering how many private keys there might be, it can be said with almost complete certainty that no one will ever use your funds and they really “went into oblivion”.
Wrong bitcoin address
If you mistakenly entered not the address you were going to send funds to, but some other valid address, your funds are lost forever, unless you know the owner of the address. In this case, you can write to him and, possibly, agree. It is impossible to find the owner of a Bitcoin wallet on your own, since the blockchain will not show any information about him, except for cryptocurrency transfers made with the participation of the wallet.
Transfer to another blockchain
As well as in the case of sending funds to an incorrect but valid address, the probability of such a transfer is extremely small. If you enter your Litecoin address as a Bitcoin transfer recipient, your client/wallet will tell you that the address is invalid. This is because each blockchain has its own way of recording and encoding addresses. So, the address of your bitcoin wallet will be recorded with the first symbol “1”, and the address of your Litecoin wallet will start with “L”.
In this case, multisig wallets (safer wallets that require several keys to enter) will be an exception, since both Bitcoin and Litecoin addresses often begin with the letter “3” in them. If you enter a valid but incorrect address, the transaction will pass and it will not be possible to stop it.
Is it possible to cancel a transaction in a blockchain or return sent cryptocurrency funds?
It is impossible to cancel a transaction or return sent funds in the blockchain. Each transaction within the blockchain of any cryptocurrency first enters the mempool (short for memory pool), before being confirmed by miners. With a sharp increase in activity on the network, a lot of transactions might accumulate in the mempool, which means it will take more time to confirm your transaction.
To speed up the confirmation of your transaction, you can set a commission. Miners will confirm such a transaction first of all, as this commission is one of the most important sources of their income.
Unconfirmed transaction: sent cryptocurrency to correct address and the funds did not reach the recipient
In most cases, if the transaction parameters are entered correctly, but the transaction has not found the recipient, it will return to your wallet within one or two days. If, after three or more days, the transaction could not find the recipient and the funds did not return to your wallet, you should consider testing it.
First, make sure that the transaction is really stuck. To do this, you will need to go to Block Explorer (database of transactions in the blockchain) of your cryptocurrency and find out if there is information about your transaction. Below are links to Block Explorers of different cryptocurrencies:
- Bitcoin
If there is no information about the transaction in Block Explorer, then it makes sense to reinstall the wallet by deleting it and logging into the client again (for multisig wallets, you must first save the private keys). Then, you will see the real state of your wallet and, most likely, there will be the amount that you had previously tried to send. There is also another solution to this problem - delete all files in the /chainstate directory - the transaction database will be downloaded again (as is the case with reinstalling the wallet) and show the actual amount of cryptocurrency in possession.
Well, to summarize: in order to avoid unnecessary worries, I advise you only to copy the address of the Bitcoin wallet where you want to transfer funds and never retype it manually Always double-check the accuracy of the address before making a transaction. Lack of attention might result in losing money.
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