P2WPKH
Also: Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash, native segwit
cryptography · intermediate
Native SegWit single-sig address. Starts with 'bc1q'. Cheaper, more reliable, and the recommended default since 2017.
P2WPKH addresses move the signature out of the transaction's input field into a separate "witness" section. Two consequences: the transaction id ("txid") doesn't depend on the signature anymore (fixing transaction malleability, which Lightning required), and the witness data gets a 75% fee discount because it doesn't count against the 1-MB legacy block size limit.
The bech32 encoding (BIP-173) is the user-visible upgrade: addresses are all-lowercase, have strong checksums that catch most typos, and decode reliably across implementations. Compared to Base58Check P2PKH addresses, error rates from manual entry drop dramatically.
For ~95% of wallets, P2WPKH is the right default. Taproot (P2TR, "bc1p...") adds privacy benefits for complex spending policies, but for plain single-sig the differences are minor and not every service can send to Taproot yet.