I sent litecoin to a bitcoin address! What to do?

Don't panic, first of all. And read our advice, secondly.

I sent litecoin to a bitcoin address! What to do?

First, let's take another look at what bitcoin (and litecoin too) addresses are from a technical point of view. That same incomprehensible gobbledygook, about thirty characters long. As an address on the network, a hash of either a public key is used (in the case of addresses starting with 1) or the so-called Script (now we will not go into detail what this is) in the case of addresses starting with "3"

For litecoin, regular ones (not multisig or segwit) start with "L". Therefore, the wallet software will not allow you to confuse litecoin and bitcoin addresses. Just compare visually:

bitcoin address:
1BQ9qza7fn9snSCyJQB3ZcN46biBtkt4ee

litecoin address:
LRiHfG6xrMMwkV95FuNcMCuk1AmQRnmiLS

Even visually they differ, at least in the first character. And wallet programs will definitely not confuse them. So how can the problem described in the title occur? 

There are options. The fact is that multisig addresses (wallets with multiple signatures) and segwit addresses in bitcoin have the prefix “3”. And unfortunately, in many implementations of litecoin, at first it was the same. That is, there was also a “3”. 

Then the developers came to their senses and “fixed everything.” For example, in the new format, the address "36cADCCb8Xn1DUh1aweZ25hNhp62x3YP8P" will already look like "MCpJX5cZ5edS1yxugpdtqiwn2WgUtgH8Bh". But many software still accept addresses in the old format. At least for backward compatibility.

And this is where the problems begin. 

The user copies the bitcoin address, inadvertently pastes it into the litecoin wallet and clicks “send”, without looking, clicks all the confirmations. And voila! litecoin went to a bitcoin address... Only technically they went to the litecoin network, but to an address SIMILAR to the bitcoin address. But the transaction certainly will not appear on the bitcoin network. So what should you do?

As a rule, in most situations the answer is “cry and forget.”

But there are options. 

Firstly, if you sent funds to an exchange, exchanger or online wallet, then you can try to contact the support service and hope that they will help you. Unfortunately, this is where the possibilities end in these cases.

Now, if the wallet address was yours, and you have full access to public and private keys, then there is a significant chance to regain your lost wealth..

So, we need: access to the console of the cryptocurrency wallets that you use (in the example described, these will be bitcoin and litecoin). If you use bitcoind+bitcoin-cli - that is, the command line version of the wallet or bitcoin-qt (reference implementation from bitcoin core) then everything is greatly simplified.

First step: export private keys. 

ATTENTION! NO ONE. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES. DO NOT SEND THE PRIVATE KEY!For example, we want to receive private keys for the address "3MWUUs2QYz9J9qGQ1KB22vPVm8k3QSAELi" It will look something like this:

$ bitcoin-cli dumpprivkey 3MWUUs2QYz9J9qGQ1KB22vPVm8k3QSAELi
Kz2s4931PqQ9nyq8Tukzx6MyK8XMNDvvhfXWxYCcVgJdErtFiwvA

This line “Kz2s4931PqQ9nyq8Tukzx6MyK8XMNDvvhfXWxYCcVgJdErtFiwvA” is the key we need. Now we need to import the received key into the litecoin wallet.

litecoin-cli importprivkey Kz2s4931PqQ9nyq8Tukzx6MyK8XMNDvvhfXWxYCcVgJdErtFiwvA 

Cross yourself or perform other religious procedures and wait. Depending on the power of your computer, in a few minutes the blockchain will be re-indexed and your funds will become available to you, and you will become the proud owner of two identical bitcoin and litecoin addresses.

If you use bitcoin-qt and litecoin-qt wallets, then you need to open the debug console and enter the commands dumpprivkey [address] and importprivkey [privkey] in it, otherwise everything happens exactly the same.

In conclusion, I will add that the method does not provide a 100% guarantee that the key will be successfully imported. 

But there is also good news. The same method can work in the case of sending Bitcoin / Bitcoin Cash.