Cryptocurrency · 2017
BIP 173: Base32 address format for native v0-16 witness outputs
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 173 · Applications · Informational · 20 March 2017
Defines Bech32, a checksummed base32 format, and the segwit addresses built on it, starting with bc1.
Read the text The whole poster as a web page
- Print from
- A2
- License
- BSD-2-Clause
- Source
- github.com
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- English
- Rights holder
- Pieter Wuille, Greg Maxwell
Theme
Download
- A seriesPrints at A0, A1, A2 or A3
- 50 × 70 cm
- 60 × 80 cm
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Print from A2: the smallest A size at which the body text is at least 8 pt.
Wallpaper
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Edition
The MediaWiki source of BIP 173 in the repository github.com/bitcoin/bips at commit 02bebeb of 25 September 2026, its current version (status Deployed, with the section Disclosures added in 2024; last changed on 12 January 2026, when its preamble fields were renamed). The full text. The preamble is in the header (title, number, layer, type, assigned date, authors and their addresses) and in the footer (its other fields but Comments-Summary and Comments-URI, a link to the wiki of the repository). The eight notes, which the source sets as numbered footnotes forming its section Rationale, between the Compatibility and Reference implementations sections, are numbered in the same order and listed at the end of the text, under that heading. Links show their text, and bare URLs are set in monospace. Lists nested in lists are kept nested, tables are set as tables, and preformatted blocks (Python code, test vectors) in monospace. Straight quotes of the text are set as typographic quotes. After the Copyright section is the text of the BSD 2-Clause License as SPDX gives it (https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-2-Clause.html), without its template copyright line, as the BIP has no copyright line. The signs ≤ and ≥ of the table headings are set in the KaTeX_Main font, as EB Garamond lacks them in italic, and the brackets of [33-126] are written as HTML entities, so that the engine does not take the range for a citation.
Rights
License: BSD-2-Clause [...] This BIP is licensed under the 2-clause BSD license.
Preamble and Copyright section of BIP 173 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0173.mediawiki), present since its first version in the repository, merged on 7 May 2017 (commit b93d9ea). The BSD 2-Clause License asks redistributions to reproduce “this list of conditions and the following disclaimer”: the poster carries its full text.
