Why Is a Bitcoin Address Shorter than the Public Key?

A Bitcoin public key is 65 bytes long (or 33 bytes for compressed format), which is quite lengthy. The address is created by hashing the public key, which produces a 20-byte hash.

This hash is then encoded using Base58Check, resulting in a shorter, alphanumeric string (typically 26-35 characters). This shorter length is more convenient for users to share and manually check for errors.