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I came across address like this s-272edf45031dd498e7b3ae89e11ff21b

In the Address with Balance List

Is the '-' a valid character?

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No, "-" is neither part of the base58 character set 123456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz used to encode non-segwit addresses, nor the bech32 character set 023456789acdefghjklmnpqrstuvwxyz used for native segwit addresses.

This "address" appears to be Blockchair's representation of a malformed output script that received ₿2,609 in a series of transactions on 2011-10-28.

General info for "address" on Blockchair

Bitcoin Talk user genjix explains that the output script 76a90088ac corresponds to a malformed standard P2PKH script which gave the address as 0.

A P2PKH output script 76a914<pkhash>88ac is composed of the following instructions:

OP_DUP (0x76), OP_HASH160 (0xa9), 0x14 (20 in hexadecimal, indicating a 20 byte push), <pubkey hash> (20 bytes), OP_EQUALVERIFY (0x88), OP_CHECKSIG (0xac)

whereas this malformed script uses an OP_0 instead of the pubkey hash:

enter image description here

OP_DUP (0x76), OP_HASH160 (0xa9), OP_0 (0x00), OP_EQUALVERIFY (0x88), OP_CHECKSIG (0xac)

Colloquially, these funds have been burnt by sending them to the address 0, which is of course not a valid address. (Since OP_HASH160 will always produce a 20-byte value, and that will never match 0, OP_EQUALVERIFY will resolve to false for any pubkey and the funds are unspendable.)

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  • Thanks. I noticed there are addressed with 0 and l as well. I assume all those are malformed and burnt as well. – s k Apr 8 at 3:43
  • Presumably. I was able to learn about this by searching the internet for the string rather than trying to look it up on a blockexplorer. – Murch♦ Apr 8 at 3:46
  • I just found out that segwit bc1 is not base58 compliance. – s k Apr 12 at 0:55
  • Yes, native segwit addresses are encoded using Bech32/Bech32m. Bech32 is defined in BIP173 if you want to read more. Bech32m is described in BIP350. – Murch♦ Apr 12 at 10:54
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That is not a valid Bitcoin address. It may be an address for an altcoin, although - is not part of the Base58 character set. It may also be a non-standard address encoding.

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