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I have mistakenly sent my litecoins to (M) as the starting letter of the address, whereas the Litecoin address now has changed to (3) as the starting letter. So can anyone help me to recover this?

2 Answers 2

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Litecoin was having issues with users confusing Bitcoin and Litecoin addresses. To that end, they introduced a new address format for Pay-to-Script-Hash (P2SH) addresses. This new address format encodes the address with an M prefix rather than the original 3 prefix which is also used by Bitcoin's P2SH address format.

As any underlying address can be expressed in either address format, each address with an M prefix has an equivalent address with a 3 prefix. They simply are two different encodings of the same P2SH address.

Check out the address in question on the CryptoId block explorer for example:

Screenshot showing both representations of a random Litecoin P2SH address

When you search the address in question on this block explorer, you should be able to see both the M address that you meant to send to as well as the 3 address that your address now changed to, just like for the random example in the image. A transaction output will arrive in the same wallet with either of these two addresses given as destination.

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Litecoin addresses have not changed to (3). its just SegWit address.

if you've sent funds to (M) Address so the receiver should have it now.

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    Adresses that start with M or 3 are not Segwit, but P2SH. ;)
    – Murch
    Jan 29, 2018 at 5:36
  • Yeah :D, I don't know why I always fail with this mistake, Maybe because P2SH addresses start with 3 as Segwit
    – Tailer
    Jan 29, 2018 at 9:35
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    Well, there are two types of segwit addresses: Native segwit has its own address format (Bech32), and the earlier one more widely deployed is actually P2SH-P2WSH, i.e. a witness script wrapped by a P2SH, so it's not strictly false, it's just that these segwit addresses are a subset of all P2SH and the other segwit addresses aren't P2SH at all. ;)
    – Murch
    Jan 29, 2018 at 16:28

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