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Could you help me understand if with segwit activated do we have more available private keys and addresses in the Bitcoin universe?

With Legacy [1...], Compatible [3...] and Bech32 [bc1...] addresses do we have 3x more possibilities ?

Thank you.

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  • P2SH has existed for half a decade, it’s not “compatible”, it’s a re use of existing technology in a new way.
    – Claris
    Commented Feb 23, 2019 at 21:48

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  • There are 2160 P2PKH addresses.
  • There are 2160 P2SH addresses
  • There are 2160 P2WPKH addresses.
  • There are 2256 P2WSH addresses.
  • There are 16 defined but unused witness versions which can be encoded by BIP173 (Bech32) addresses, each with data length 2 to 40 bytes. That's 16*256/255*(25640 - 256) =~ 2324.006.

That's 2144363455669619533814323684450670475181580230986810095535626033037852598144837730344835022389248 in total.

The number of private keys has not changed; that's still slightly less than 2256, namely 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336. Only the number of ways to use them increased.

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