What is the difference between ICAP and HEX addresses?

Question

I've read what Kraken have mentioned in the difference guide but I haven't understood it well.

I plan to mine ethereum. What fits better for me?

Answer 1

Briefly, ICAP addresses are safer to use, since they have a checksum which provides protection against mistyping an address. But ICAP adoption isn't as widespread currently. For mining you can use either, since a HEX address, when needed, can always be obtained from an ICAP address.

More information:

What is an ICAP address?

Why don't Ethereum addresses have checksums?

See also questions tagged with address and icap.

Answer 2

Kraken sais:

ICAP is the best option for wallets that support it.

So the direct answer to your question is a list of clients which support it:

• eth seems to support ICAP but it's integration looks experimental. I would use hex instead.
• geth does not support ICAP. Use HEX instead. Basic ICAP support is planned for future releases, maybe starting at version 1.4.x.
• mist does not support ICAP. Use HEX instead. Source.
• ethereum-js seems to support ICAP, but I guess you are not using a JavaScript client.

TL;DR use HEX for now.