Bech32
Bech32 is the 32-character checksummed encoding defined by Bitcoin BIP 173, designed for human-readable SegWit addresses, with a built-in 6-character BCH checksum.
Purpose
It provides error detection for cryptocurrency addresses, guarding against character mistakes made during manual transcription or OCR.
Mechanism
The data part is concatenated with the human-readable prefix (HRP), a BCH checksum is computed over it, and the result is appended as a 6-character checksum suffix. The checksum detects any single-character error and most 2-4 character errors.
Use cases
- Bitcoin SegWit addresses
- Cryptocurrency address encoding
- Human-readable checksummed data