how to recognize the cryptocurrency from the address

Let’s suppose you have in hand some address to which cryptocurrency can be sent.  You might wonder “which cryptocurrency can be sent to that address?”  A chief reason that you might wonder is that if a person were to send an incorrect currency to a particular address, the result might be complete loss of the money. 

I was fascinated to find that if you look at an address (to which cryptocurrency might be sent) you can often work out which cryptocurrency it is.  For example:

• Bitcoin (BTC) starts with 1, 3, or bc1.
• Ethereum (ETH) starts with 0x.
• Bitcoin testnet (tBTC) starts with tb1.

Having said this, it seems that a person who wants to be very sure can reach higher confidence by using a blockchain explorer to look up the address.

Of course the prudent thing to do, before sending any large amount of currency to any particular address, is to send a small test transaction first.  Then confirm that it worked.  Only after that should you send the large amount of currency.