What is the difference between ICAP and HEX addresses?

Question

I've read what Kraken have mentioned in the difference guide but I haven't understood it well.

I plan to mine ethereum. What fits better for me?

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 13:01

5

Briefly, ICAP addresses are safer to use, since they have a checksum which provides protection against mistyping an address. But ICAP adoption isn't as widespread currently. For mining you can use either, since a HEX address, when needed, can always be obtained from an ICAP address.

More information:

What is an ICAP address?

Why don't Ethereum addresses have checksums?

See also questions tagged with address and icap.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 13:01

Community

1

answered Feb 18 '16 at 20:46

eth

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Is it even possible to send ETH to an ICAP address using geth or eth, yet? – q9f Feb 19 '16 at 10:25
@5chdn Answered by you in this question, and also http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/330/which-ethereum-clients-wallets-support-the-icap Maybe we can link your 2 answers better ;) – eth Feb 19 '16 at 13:19

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 19 '16 at 11:12

Kraken sais:

ICAP is the best option for wallets that support it.

So the direct answer to your question is a list of clients which support it:

eth seems to support ICAP but it's integration looks experimental. I would use hex instead.
geth does not support ICAP. Use HEX instead. Basic ICAP support is planned for future releases, maybe starting at version 1.4.x.
mist does not support ICAP. Use HEX instead. Source.
ethereum-js seems to support ICAP, but I guess you are not using a JavaScript client.

TL;DR use HEX for now.

What is the difference between ICAP and HEX addresses?

2 Answers2

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