Topic: Blockchain.info - Bitcoin Block explorer & Currency Statistics - page 4. (Read 482646 times)

This is because you are trying to look at bitcoin at a technical level without any understanding of how bitcoin actually works.  You've come to the right place to learn.


At the technical level, bitcoin doesn't maintain a balance at an address.  Instead, the blockchain allows the wallet to SEPARATELY keep track of all the individual payments that have been sent to an address.  The wallet might choose to add those payments up and show you the total as a balance, but they are actually still separate units in the blockchain.

It would be more accurate to say that you have "a list of payments all sent to address A such that the sum of those payments is 10 BTC".


No. Bitcoin doesn't "send BTC from" anywhere.  It chooses unspent payments, and lists them in the transaction to provide value to that transaction.  After they have been listed in a transaction they are considered to be "spent".  They can therefore never again be used to provide value to any future transaction.

So, in the case you are describing, the previously received payment that the wallet chose to spend was a single unspent 5 BTC payment that you received in the past.

Then, once value has been provided to the transaction with the list of previously received payments, the wallet adds a list of NEW unspent payments that can be spent in the future.  In this case, it added a 3 BTC payment to an address under the control of the exchange.


Correct.

The way bitcoin transactions work is that there is a list of unspent previously received payments that add value to the transaction and a list of new unspent payments that reassign that value.  Any value left over in the transaction that hasn't been reassigned is the TRANSACTION FEE which the miner is allowed to assign to himself.

So, if the transaction didn't have that 2 BTC payment listed in the transaction, then the miner would have received a 2 BTC transaction fee!

This payment in the transaction is often called the "change", because it is much like paying a merchant for a $10 item with a $20 bill.  You get back a payment of a $10 bill as "change" from the transaction.

You'll often see it described as a "change output".


More specifically, the sum of the unspent remaining SEPARATE payments to that address is 5 BTC.



Hopefully you can now see why a payment is made to address b.


No it does not.  It wouldn't matter if that payment were sent to A or to B.  It is still a separate payment.  Sending it to A would not reduce the cost of using that payment in a future transaction.


Since it isn't going to increase the cost of future transactions, it makes sense to use a new address.  This increases privacy and slightly increases security.


That is only because address A was re-used to receive multiple payments. This is a bad practice.  Whenever possible a new address should be used for every payment received.

By re-using the address when you received the payments, you damaged your own privacy as well as some of the privacy of those you transact with.

Too many people mistakenly think of a bitcoin address as an account number.  This is a very common misunderstanding.

A better analogy would be to think of a bitcoin address as an invoice number.  It is a way to identify who sent you the bitcoins, and why they sent them.  If you give every sender a separate address for every payment that they will send you, then you can keep track of who you gave the address to and what the reason was.


How did you transfer them if you didn't have the private key?


No.  They are just additional addresses generated from the same wallet memonic.


Blockchain.info has a reputation for having issues with their website and wallet.  It wouldn't surprise me at all if they had a bug that didn't display all the transactions.



Correct.

The wallet chose 2 unspent previously received payments to provide value to the transaction.  Rather than list 2 separate payments received at the same address, it listed 2 separate payments received at two different addresses. The wallet most likely did this because it couldn't find a single unspent payment received at any address that was big enough to cover the entire value needed.  As such, this doesn't change the size of the transaction at all.  It might even make the transaction smaller if the "one address" which "has enough to cover the entire transaction" actually received all that value spread across more than two payments.


Not excess.  Your wallet almost certainly didn't have a single unspent previously received payment large enough to cover the entire value of the transaction. Therefore, it was necessary to add another previously received payment to the list.


I guess that depends on how small a transaction has to be to be considred a "microtransaction".  But in my opinion, bitcoin hasn't been viable for microtransactions for a while now, and will probably not be ever again.  (I'd consider a "microtransaction" to be anything less than $0.01 worth of value).

Reusing addresses is considered not safe too if you are using a bad wallet. When you send Bitcoin from A to B and change is send to C, other than you, nobody will know C is your address. They can only speculate that it might be a "change" address. If you send Bitcoin frequently, using different addresses will make tracking your transactions more harder. If you only use one address, everybody can see all the transactions you have ever made which is pretty bad IMO.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse#Security


If you are using https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39, change '0' to '1' in "External/Internal" in derivation path to see your change addresses.

m/44'/0'/0'/1 - you can also copy-paste this if derivation path is not as detailed as the above tool.


Ask their support. They won't reply in this forum.


Transaction fee will pretty high if you use faucets or gambling sites or receive many (micro) transactions. Transaction fee will only increase for such users if change addresses are also used. If you don't want to use new addresses per transaction, get private key of that address from seed (12-word recovery phrase) and import it to your wallet.

Note: Don't use two wallets with same seed. E.g. Blockchain.info + Copay or Blockchain.info + Mycelium or Mycelium + Bither etc. If you send Bitcoin from wallet₁ and it send change to a new address, that address won't be shown in second wallet. Thus, Bitcoin sent to that address won't be shown as you balance. Don't do it unless you know your stuff!

I've used this wallet intensively for the byteball coindrop, I've experienced some frustration.
(numbers are fictional for privacy)

1)
What's the reason coin is sent from a to b? All it does is increase fee costs for this and future transactions.
I'd assume it's because reusing addresses is bad for privacy. But this is not the case here as some coin is still is A.

2)
Also, using the memonic passphrase I can sign messages with any specific addresses of any specific wallet. (using github tools in offline mode)
Some coin of a wallet was sitting in an address, comparable to address B above, for which I could not locate the private key.
I had to transfer those coin to a new receiving address of the same wallet, for which I did locate the private key.
Maybe these intermediate addresses have a different type than the receiving addresses? not sure


any eta for signing messages within the client (for non-imported addresses)?

3)
Some transactions to previously used addresses were not showing up in the transaction page, although the balance was correct.
I'll investigate this later on, I might be wrong

EDIT: I just send another tx, now a transaction from 2 addresses, although one address has enough to cover the entire transaction??? That's like 0.5$ lost in excess tx size fees I can't imagine this being good for microtransactions.

Thank you for your reply, i didn't realise i could control my private keys with a web wallet! I will look into getting this done now. I read somewhere that Roger Ver is an investor in Blockchain.info, whether he can sway the board into following his path is anybody's guess. If he is a major investor, i guess they will toe his line and support BTU over BTC, but unless they are sure of hitting a majority, they would not take such a huge risk. They might reveal their strategy a week before Aug 1 i suppose!

I believe they didn't state anything regarding this. I mean even If they have their technical issues etc. I doubt that they will screw over their clients without any notice, this could pretty much kill them but just to be safe, you may want to backup your private keys and stay in full control.

Not sure if anyone has covered this already (i went back 3-4 pages and didn't find any mention of it), come august 1st, will blockhain.info wallets support Legacy BTC or BTU? I would really love to know their official position on this, i don't see any information on their wallet landing page either! I think it is in the interest of every member who owns a web wallet, to understand how their coins may be affected by the upcoming soft fork. Apologies if they have already covered this somewhere! Please guide me to the post, if you find it! Thanks.

Logged in, only to find that there is no setting for notifying only after 1-? confirmations. I don't want to get an SMS or email notification for unconfirmed TX...

Thanks for checking. I don't have a blockchain.info wallet so I couldn't check myself. It looks like you can still choose your own sat/byte fee rate, and that's the most important feature. A month ago it seemed almost the only way to get a blockchain.info fee high enough to get fast confirmations.

Yes, that's right when you click those "customize fee" you can customize your tx fee in sat/byte, that's the advance sending option of the wallet. But I don't think if it really does since I'm not using blockchain in sending tho I  have a  wallet there for viewing the issue of others. Just see the image below when you click the "customize fee"

Is that "customize fee" at the lower right of the screenshot a clickable link, or non-clickable text? If it's clickable what happens if you click it?

Pff, dude, like really. I was freaking out. It helped that I have two wallets with different e-mailaddresses so when they both didn't work I felt a little better but still...was looking for some status-updates. Bad thing they didnt put it on Twitter or something. Would've helped a lot of ppl.

Been trying to get veri-email for 5-6 hours. I just managed to get the email from Blockchain so hopefully it's fixed system-wide and you allcan access you accounts now.

Anyone else get a momentary "Fuck, I've been hacked" type fear? I did for a sec.

Does anyone else having problems loggin in to their wallet? I have two wallets and both registred to different e-mail accounts. Whenever I try to login it says that it's send me an e-mail to confirm/authorize the login. I've had e-mails like this before so I know the e-mail adresses are correct. But now, it's been over an hour and I still havent received the e-mails for loggin in. Is this a bug, technical problem for the time being or is there something else?

Send option look like this today, there is new feature to pick Regular or Priority fee but there is no Advanced Send anymore.

I didn't knew they had this option before but from googling I found this (which looks like a new article): https://support.blockchain.com/hc/en-us/articles/209283686-Sending-Bitcoin

So, there is no "Advanced Send" option again with BC.info wallet now ?
I try to search more info/official news about it but can't find anything at all.

That and even if you set high fees,it will throw an error stating "The fees you have chosen is higher than the usual you may want to lower it" but their estimation isn't right.Better use a fee calculator and send the transaction with estimated fee anyway.

You can change fees on blockchain.info.  You just have to go to the "advanced send" section and you can set the fee yourself. 

The problem is that all you see is a number, not an estimation of the satoshi/byte that you'll be sending.  Since Blockchain's ordinary fee estimation is either 120 satoshi/byte (wayyy too low) or completely unpredictable, you just end up having no idea what kind of fees you're sending at all.

I have read multiple posts saying that their fees were high but lately, their transaction are not being confirmed, the fees are usually calculated by an algorithm based on some factors so It won't be static. I suggest using Electrum because It has dynamic fees so you could change them as you wish to.

But how much is send/withdrawal/miners fees