How to Recover BCH sent to a BTC Address

Let's face it, BTC addresses aren't that easy to differentiate from BCH addresses, well thats because BCH is a fork of BTC. Most people have had the daunting process of always checking the address they want to send their BCH, and to make sure it's the right one.

Due to this similarities, we find people making this kind of mistake more often than not.

Recovering BCH sent to a BTC address, technically depends on two things;

1. If the BTC address you sent it to, belongs to you, or you at least control the private key for that address. This is especially important in cases where users end up sending BCH to BTC addresses belonging to exchanges. Without private keys, the customer is reliant on the goodwill and patience of the exchange to remedy the mishap. Some exchanges have done their best to help; some have shrugged it off as not being their problem.
   

2. If the BTC address you sent the BCH to, is a Segwit address. Sending BCH to a regular BTC address is unfortunate but not always fatal. But what happens when bitcoin cash is sent to a segwit bitcoin address? That’s when things get complicated. Legacy bitcoin addresses start with a 1, whereas segwit addresses generally start with a 3. (There are also segwit addresses that start with bc1, but that technically isn't supported by BCH, so it won't be a problem.) The trouble is that while segwit addresses start with a 3, not all addresses that start with a 3 are segwit compatible. And there’s the problem.

HOW TO RECOVER MY BCH IF I HAVE THE PRIVATE KEY FOR MY BTC ADDRESS

If you have the private key to the destination wallet (BTC address), retrieving the coins is relatively straightforward.

I'll be using electron cash in this guide. You can get it from http://electroncash.org

After downloading and installing electron-cash for the first time, you'll be prompted to select between auto server and manual server

1. Choose auto server >

2. click on new wallet >

3. select import bitcoin address or private key >

4. paste the key there, and click next. The coins should show right up... Pretty straight forward right?!

HOW TO RECOVER MY BCH IF I HAVE THE SEED PHRASE FOR MY BTC WALLET

If you don't know how to get the private key for your wallet, but have the seed phrase, no need to worry. Follow these steps and you should be able to recover the BCH

Open up Electron-cash

1. click on new wallet >

2. standard wallet >

3. I have seed >

4. put the seed phrase in the box that pops up >

5. click options and tick bip39 ( If you had a passphrase on your wallet, you can enable the extend seed option here. If not, leave it as is.) >

6. Derivation path is usually the tricky part.. Different wallets have different derivation paths... wallets like bitcoin.com, Jaxx use m/44'/0'/0' and some others use m/0'.. so its usually best to find out the path used by your wallet first.

7. After that, you click next and the coins should show up.

HOW TO RECOVER MY BCH IF I SENT IT TO SEGWIT BTC ADDRESS

Unfortunately, the only way to recover the coins, is to contact a miner...

I Have been in contact with a miner on reddit who has had some few successes so far. If you need help regarding sending bch to a segwit, hit me up on reddit u/dcryptoguy

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