Bitcoin address

A Bitcoin address is a hash of a public key. Each Bitcoin address has its own unique private key.

A Bitcoin address is a base58 encoded string that contains

• The address's version number
• The hash
• A checksum to detect errors

Bitcoin addresses are calculated from a public key: RIPEMD-160(SHA-256(public-key)).

A transaction moves Bitcoins from one address to another.

So, at any given time, all then existing bitcoins are associated with a bitcoin address.