Topic: Can anyone help me recognize three BTC addresses? (Read 244 times)

I come back to this thread with two more addresses I need to find their origins, if someone can identify them. Wallet Explorer was of no use for these ones either...

168QpsHpNaGuNKzsFPXmWDkzTHBByed3Hc
1PUiYipeaSB5gVjLbUPdZLEzrPwneoUQuh

There was also a third address - 1DRD6Cy2raEUU4MScESBVeu2tCBpjVP6be - but I already recovered that. It was a Blockchain.com address and this makes me think the other 4 ones (two from OP) and two written above are also from Blockchain.com...

I am trying help someone to recover them and, considering all 4 belong to same person maybe they are all four from Blockchain.com. He already wrote to their support, proved he was the owner of an old email and they gave him two wallet identifiers. One identifier was of the found wallet - 1DRD6Cy2raEUU4MScESBVeu2tCBpjVP6be. But he does not know to which of the remaining four wallets belongs the second identifier, as he also does not remember the password for the second identifier.

Any help / suggestion would be highly appreciated!

It is great indeed that he recovered already one of the 5 addresses, which was one containing 0.99 BTC but still, I'd like to help him recover the other ones too...

I am almost 100% convinced that the address does not belong to an exchange. I believe it is somehow connected to Blockchain.com wallet, but I don't know how (yet). Did you check the links I provided above, where this address is mentioned? Especially this one.

Besides, if you check this address using the Search function of the forum, you'll find plenty of topics where it is mentioned. Maybe one of the most relevant post this this one, made by piuk, which is also the OP of the topic Blockchain.info - Bitcoin Block explorer & Currency Statistics:


All the search results from the forum, all the 3 links I mentioned in OP about this address and, ultimately, the above quote make me think that this address is connected to Blockchain.com wallet. And if this is true, then I come back to the other two address from OP:

1GENmtQhhFhrEKLqV8JRftxYWdCdDxRG7D
1EGNSasgE9uwrok6vviw4Bo7nSu1XgKubY

Considering that when those addresses sent funds, each time they sent the funds to a destination but also 0.005 BTC to 1A8JiWcwvpY7tAopUkSnGuEYHmzGYfZPiq, is it possible then that those addresses are also Blockchain.com addresses?

There's no such thing as a CoinJoin Mess. Since WalletExplorer groups transactions by wallet names as opposed to address, the coinjoin must have confused it and it couldn't figure out where the coins were sent to (as expected from CoinJoin).

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Did you try checking how many transactions are associated with these addresses? If they were used thousands of times it's definitely an exchange as no mere mortal can use an address that many times.

This address in particular has 7800+ transactions.

I would need some help from experienced bitcoiners regarding three addresses. I would like to find out (at least) if they belong to an exchange or if they are simple wallet addresses. I tried to check them by my own, using Wallet Explorer, but it showed me some curious results (detailed below), therefore I'm wondering if anyone knows about an alternative tool.

OK, let's see some details.

First of all, I am interested in these two addresses:

1GENmtQhhFhrEKLqV8JRftxYWdCdDxRG7D
1EGNSasgE9uwrok6vviw4Bo7nSu1XgKubY

By checking them with Wallet Explorer (1 and 2), they don't seem to belong to an exchange, therefore I believe they are simple wallet addresses. Wallet Explorer also tells that they belong to different wallets.

What is common for both addresses is that 0.005 BTC transaction which is associated with all spent coins from both addresses. The difference is this: the first address sent all coins together with those 0.005 BTC, while the second address sent funds twice in the same day (to BTC-e and to a wallet (?)) and spent those 0.005 BTC in a separate transaction, but still in the very same day and almost at same hour.

Another common thing for both is that both addresses were initially funded by the same wallet (which is also a wallet not recognized by Wallet Explorer).

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Now we get to the third address. This one is the address where the 0.005 BTC were sent at each transaction by the addresses mentioned above. Wallet Explorer identifies that those 0.005 BTC transactions were sent to CoinJoin Mess. I don't know what this CoinJoin Mess could be. Could it be a particular implementation of CoinJoin, which has the name "CoinJoin Mess"? Or is it a normal CoinJoin transaction and the "Mess" part is due to the way Wallet Explorer shows these transactions...?

Anyway, now if you click in Wallet Explorer on that CoinJoin Mess you'll see very many addresses. But if we search both initial addresses with another block explorer (e.g. Blockchair), we can see that each time, the 0.005 BTC transactions were actually sent to a single address:

1A8JiWcwvpY7tAopUkSnGuEYHmzGYfZPiq

Now, if we check this address again with Wallet Explorer, it is still displayed as CoinJoin Mess, so Blockchair's result is correct. But now we also know precisely at which CoinJoin Mess address were sent those funds.

Going forward with these 0.005 BTC transactions, we can find something even more interesting. Given the fact that the transactions made with those two addresses are from 2012, in order to identify them, I thought that maybe they were made from a wallet which offered CoinJoin services back then. Therefore I tried to search for old services with CoinJoin implementations, but I couldn't find anything from 2012. Or almost anything. What I found though was a topic on BitcoinTalk, from 2013 (so 1 year later than those transactions), where Greg Maxwell explained how CoinJoin works: CoinJoin: Bitcoin privacy for the real world. As far as I could find, this was also the very first public mention of CoinJoin, which implies that those transactions used CoinJoin even before CoinJoin was first publicly discussed! (Which, if true, I believe it's amazing!) However, in that topic Greg Maxwell stated this:


Which means that although CoinJoin was first publicly discussed in 2013, it was possible since the creation of Bitcoin, therefore it was possible for those transactions to use this mixing. This aspect doesn't bring more light about the "CoinJoin Mess" part, but it's still interesting to read.

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OK, now going a bit deeper into the rabbit hole named 1A8JiWcwvpY7tAopUkSnGuEYHmzGYfZPiq (meaning the CoinJoin Mess), if you search this address on Google you can find some interesting results (1, 2, 3) which seem to correlate this address with Blockchain.com wallet. Furthermore, I found also an old topic on the forum talking about this address: which address will get the money in multisig?.

Could this be an address of Blockchain.com? Eventually, an address where Blockchain.com collected transaction fees? And if so, could it be that in 2012 Blockchain.com (named at that time Blockchain.info) used CoinJoin? At present, this wallet doesn't use CoinJoin.

If that address belongs to Blockchain.com, does that imply that the first two mentioned addresses belong also to Blockchain.com?

Any technical opinions are highly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

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