Bitcoin Cash keys - private key and public key pair - represents Bitcoin Cash account. That is, if you know a pair of private key and public key, that means you can receive BCH coin from someone else and also you send BCH coin to other person.
Public key can be generated from private key and Bitcoin Cash address can be generated from public key. So if you ask me which one of the keys you absolutely need to have, I would say private key. Generally, you will have private key for spending and Bitcoin Cash address for receiving.
Bitcoin Cash keys and its BCH address are typically generated by Wallet. And of course, developers can generate the keys with programming language. Without Wallet or programming, we can also use a tool or website. In this post, I will show you how to use cashaddress.org website that generates new Bitcoin Cash keys and BCH address.
https://cashaddress.org is a simple but useful website that generates new Bitcoin Cash address and keys. After generating new BCH address, you can also print keys and address information, which is so-called paper wallet.
cashaddress.org is a open source JavaScript BCH wallet generator, which is well known. It is using client side JavaScript only, so not sending data to server. The entire source code is JavaScript (with bare minimum HTML), which can be inspected from "View page source" menu of your browser.
HOW TO GENERATE BCH Keys and BCH Addresses
In order to create BCH keys and address, I would do the following steps.
(1) Open browser and visit https://cashaddress.org website
(2) Save web page as cashaddress.org.html in your local computer
(3) Close browser
(4) Disconnect Network Connection on your local computer
(5) Doubleclick cashaddress.org.html in your local computer. This will load local html file in your browser without internet connection. Here you will see the same cashaddress.org web page as the real website.
NOTE: Step2 ~ Step5 is for extra caution. I sometimes skip those steps, but if you're cautious, you might want to follow those steps.
(6) Move your mouse to add extra randomness until it reaches 100%.
(7) Once it reaches 100%, you will see new BCH keys and BCH address. In the picture below, Bitcoin Cash address is shown on the left, starting with "bitcoincash:q" and private key is located on the right, starting with "L". You can click "Print" in this screen in order to print(or screen capture) the private key and BCH address. If you can use a printer directly connected to your PC via USB connector, that will be more secure. And once printed, this will be your BCH Paper Wallet.
Bitcoin Cash is using two different main address formats.
One format is legacy address format that is the same address format as Bitcoin's P2PKH/P2SH address. This legacy address starts with "1" (P2PKH address) or "3" (P2SH address) such as 1GCPYUwvjnPqB6ZJRikMRfBzwWiVH6wggV. Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin, so it supported this original legacy Bitcoin's address format.
The other format is Cash Address (Cash Addr) format, which is most common address format in Bitcoin Cash. The Cash Addr format was introduced to avoid any confusion between BTC address and BCH address. Cash Address always starts with "q" or "p".
Most of time we use Cash Address format, but for old coins the address might be original legacy address format. And rarely you might see a BCH address starting with "C", which is BitPay's BCH address format.
If you want to change address format between Legacy Address and Cash Address, you can use https://cashaddr.bitcoincash.org website.
(8) (Optional) If you want generate paper wallet having multiple BCH addresses, you can choose "Paper Wallet". By default, it will generate 3 new addresses and keys, but you can choose different number in "Addresses to generate". This paper wallet has BCH address on the left and private key on the right, with QR codes. Please note the addresses generated here in Paper Wallet are different from BCH address of Step7.
(9) Close browser (Just in case, this will ensure nothing will be sent to outside since any JavaScript in HTML cannot be run once Browser is closed).
(10) Enable Network Connection.
Instead of Step9 ~ 10, you can reboot PC (and turn off your printer if used), which is better.
From above steps, you now have BCH address and the corresponding private key. You can send BCH address to someone else, so that you can receive BCH coins. You can check transactions in BCH Explorer website such as https://explorer.bitcoin.com/bch
In the BCH explorer website, you can just enter your BCH address in search box to check your balance.
If you want to check Bitcoin Cash address and public key from your private key, you can use "Wallet Details" in cashaddress.org. In Wallet Details, you can put your private key and click "View Details", then Bitcoin Cash address (compress/uncompressed), public key (compress/uncompressed), private key (compress/uncompressed) information will be displayed.
As a side note, if you use compressed BCH address, you need to use compress private key and for uncompressed BCH address, use uncompressed one.
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