Address and priv key longitude?

Question

Hi, I've read this article https://www.multichain.com/developers/address-key-format/ and I don't have clear how long is a public address and a private key. By what I understood, I think the public address is 65 bytes and the private key is 41 bytes, but I find those numbers rare

 

 

Answer 1

It's a little more complex than that.

First, a compressed public key (which most are) is 33 bytes, not 65 bytes.

Second, an address is not the same as a public key, since it's a 28-byte string calculated from it.

Third, both addresses and private keys are expressed in base58, to make them easy to type, copy and paste. This adds about 36% to their length, compared to expressing them as a raw string of bytes.