Tells a user how to pay a recipient. Bitcoin addresses are strings consisting of numbers and letters that begin with '1', '3', or 'bc1'. Addresses encode the recipient's output script that includes either a public key or a hash of a public key or script. Bitcoin addresses should not be confused with mailing addresses or IP addresses.
A Bitcoin address is an encoding the hash of an ECDSA public key or a script. Addresses are give out to others so that Bitcoin can be sent to the owner of the address.
Addresses encode a specific type of output and output script to the wallet.
An address that begins with a 1 is a Pay-To-Public-Key-Hash address. It is the Base58 Check Encoding of the RIPEMD160 of the SHA256 of an ECDSA public key. It tells the wallet that the output script should be of the form OP_DUP OP_HASH160 <pubkey hash> OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG.
An address that begins with a 3 is a Pay-To-Script-Hash address. It is the Base58 Check Encoding of the RIPEMD160 of the SHA256 of a script, known as the redeemScript. It tells the wallet that the output script should be of the form OP_HASH160 <script hash> OP_EQUAL.
An address that begins with the string bc1 is the BIP 173 (bech32) encoding of a witness version number and either a public key hash or a script hash. If the address is decoded to a data part that consists of 20 bytes and a version number of 0, it refers to a Pay-To-Witness-Public-Key-Hash output. These addresses specify that the output script be a native segwit output of the form OP_0 <public key hash> The <public key hash is the same hash as in a P2PKH address explained above.
If the address is decoded to a data part that consists of 32 bytes and a version number of 1, it refers to a Pay-To-Witness-Script-Hash output. These addresses specify that the output script be a native segwit output of the form OP_0 <script hash>. The script hash is the SHA256 of the witness script.
