Author

Topic: Change addresses don't show up in bitcoin-qt anymore ? (Read 4071 times)

legendary
Activity: 1890
Merit: 1086
Ian Knowles - CIYAM Lead Developer
The change addresses have *never* been shown in the UI AFAIA (unless you use the "coin control" patch).

When you send coins Bitcoin basically randomly chooses which UTXOs to use (including the change ones of course). This is by design to help with your "pseudo-anonymity".

Use "listunspent" to get a list of all your UTXOs.
full member
Activity: 204
Merit: 100
Summary :
I just had a big scare and thought I lost some BTC when noticing change addresses do not show up in the "receive coins" list of addresses in bitcoin-qt 0.8.1.

History :
2 days ago I send a small payment using the bitcoin-qt client.
today I decide to get my bitcoin-qt wallet balance back to a round number by moving some BTC to it from by blockchain.info wallet.
then, lurking around the transaction history, I realize in horror I don't seem to "own" the change address 23 BTC went to then I sent the payment 2 days ago ! It does not appear anywhere in the bitcoin-qt gui !
after some panicking, restarting bitcoin-qt... I realise I can still sign a message using this address. So I must still have the private key somehow.

For now crisis has been avoided, it turns out I still have the private key to the change address and access to all my BTC wealth. However I would like to raise that as a potential issue and/or get a better understanding of what exactly happened.
* How do I know which addresses I own, if they don't all appear in the "receive coins" list in bitcoin-qt ?
* I found the "listaddressgroupings" rpc command which shows the change address among others, however it does not show all my addresses ? (eg the vanity ones imported manually)
* How do I make *all* the addresses my wallet.dat contains appear in the list ?
* Any way to not send change in bitcoin-qt ? I understand the anonimity reason behind it but I find it very dangerous.
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