When Bitcoin Cash began as a fork of $BTC on Aug 1st 2017 it kept the legacy address format. This ended up causing quite a bit of confusion and resulted in lost funds as users accidentially sent $BCH to $BTC addresses and vice versa.
To fix this cashaddr was introduced. It’s a base32 endcoding based on Bech32.
Conversion Tool
BITBOX recently added it’s own conversion tool so you can quickly and easily convert legacy base58Check encoded Bitcoin Cash addresses in to the cashaddr format.
Simply paste in a legacy or cashaddr address and BITBOX will convert it to both formats and generate QR codes.
You can also paste in a private key in Wallet Import Format (WIF) to generate cashaddr/legacy addresses and QR codes.
We’re using bchaddr.js along w/ qrcode.react.
let wif = 'L3npdkC5BkLZP2d6orb5ZefXYZFzkiteDB5okSgyuYJeGXLH3QNA';
let ecpair = BITBOX.ECPair.fromWIF(wif);
let cashaddr = BITBOX.ECPair.toCashAddress(ecpair);
let base58Check = BITBOX.ECPair.toLegacyAddress(ecpair);
let cashaddrQR = <QRCode value={cashaddr} />;
let base58CheckQR = <QRCode value={base58Check} />;
let wifQR = <QRCode value={wif} />;
Sending actual funds
All the addresses in BITBOX are 100% legit on the $BCH network. However BITBOX doesn’t actually connect to the Bitcoin Cash network so if you were to send actual $BCH to one of these generated addresses you wouldn’t see it. You would be able to see it in a live block explorer.
You can safely sweep any funds sent to a BITBOX generated address into a wallet via the private key WIF. But we strongly advice against sending any actual funds to a BITBOX address. This is a development tool and not meant to handle actual funds.
If you want to send real coins to a BITBOX address and then sweep them back into a live wallet we suggest using the $BCH testnet.