Topic: From holder to spender.... - page 2. (Read 4751 times)

How can retailers you're buying from see your bitcoin balance?

bitcoin is fungible. The above mindset is going to cause bitcoin to potentially fail as people give certain inputs more value then others.

It is illogical to not spend bitcoin on something you are going to buy anyway but can use bitcoin to get an overall lower price

If you use them you can always buy more. I guess I don't understand why people feel that the bitcoins in their wallet are more precious than all the others.

You should not have a "main" bitcoin address. You should create a new address for every time you either send or receive bitcoin

10 BTC is a lot of money. It is tough to say how much is enough.

Call me a retard but I would need like about 10 BTC to feel safe enough to spend BTC without feeling horrible in 3 years.

With Mycelium, for example, you could create two wallets: one savings (your 'main wallet), and one spending. Both will be HD (all secured with the same, single backup) and nobody will be able to tell they're linked. Whenever you transfer some small amount from your savings wallet to your spending wallet, the remainder of your savings is moved to a new address.

Let's say I have 100BTC in my main wallet and I want to pay people without them knowing about my main wallet.  How will an HD wallet help?  I could transfer small amounts from my main wallet to my HD wallet, but when I pay someone from my HD wallet, the inputs will come from an address funded by my main wallet every time.

No, not entirely. Old, simplistic wallets use one address for multiple transactions, both sending and receiving. This is obviously bad for your privacy (and somewhat bad for other, more technical reasons as well).

HD wallets do this:

You have some coins on address A. When spending coins, you send them to merchant X, and the change (leftover) goes to a new address B. When spending coins the next time, you send them to merchant Y, and the change goes to a new address C. And so on. New HD Wallet addresses A, B, C, etc are generated on the fly upon every transaction (incoming as well as outgoing).

So, they are only linked to a certain extent. If you have 100 BTC on address A, and spend small amounts (e.g. 0.4 BTC, 0.3 BTC etc) with the change (e.g. 99.6 BTC, 99.3 BTC, etc) going to address B and C, someone can sortof guess that A, B and C probably belong together.

However if you keep small amounts in your wallet, like 1 BTC, and you spend 0.4 BTC, meaning 0.4 BTC will go to X and 0.6 BTC will go to B, people can't tell for sure which was yours: X or B? (did you spend 0.4 or 0.6?) And so on - the more transactions you do, the less likely someone is to still link it together with any degree of certainty. Within a few cycles, the expanding transaction tree becomes unmanagable and nobody will be able to tell your addresses apart from others.

If you absolutely, positively need to be 100% certain nobody can link your addresses, use a mixer. This is very easy, but not free (mixing services charge a small fee). However, in practice, you shouldn't worry about this at all. Just put small amounts on your wallet, by the time it's almost empty, add a little extra from your savings, and so on. Really, nobody will know or care.

Addresses are linked when they are inputs in the same transaction. This is an issue for every wallet.

This "risk" is very easy to mitigate, especially with Mycelium. It has an excellent backup procedure, very easy, and 100% fool proof. You write down the backup sentence *once*, and you can restore your wallet forever, on any device. Even new private keys you generate in the future. Try it. Really, it works.

Can anyone confirm this?  None of the addresses can be derived by any of the other addresses?  If that really is the case then my search is over.

risk is that when your phone is lost or damaged and had to reinstall

Just use Bitcoin Wallet or Mycelium. Transfer small amount from your cold wallet to the apps and then begin spend from there. Shouldn't be much of a hassle as I also did the same.

I have used many android btc wallets,

Green Address- it's not bad but can be a bit slow.
Mycelium- Good wallet and very easy to use for anyome.
Blockchain- Used to be good but just too many problems, heaps of blockchain hacked posts, would not recommend.
Coinbase- East to use, great for beginners and very good security. Just remember they have your private keys so not all people would agree to use it.
Wallet32- The best HD wallet for me, very fast and i have had no problems at all.

These wallets are only good for holding a small amount of coins for spending, due to being online walles and anything online can be hacked.
If your holding anything above $50 worth take it offline and get that btc into a paper or hardware wallet.

With the Bither app it's one touch maybe 2, I think mycelium is just a few too.

Is it really that easy?  As long as I use Mycelium (or another HD wallet), I can send and receive BTC and automatically no one will be able to link any 2 transactions I've made?

By simply using a HD wallet, like Mycelium. It takes care of everything. You have to make a backup once (writing 12 words on a piece of paper, but that in a safe) and from that point on, any current and future addresses (and their private keys) can always be restored. For every incoming or outgoing transaction, it will automatically switch to a new address. No user involvement required whatsoever. Really, it doesn't get easier than that.

What would the workflow be like to accomplish that?

+1. Recently lost 1BTC due to blockchain.info's android app. For some reason, I think after an update,  it no longer accepted my PIn or password. Well, it accepts the pin, which should unlock the password, but then says the password is incorrect. No amount of reentering the pw solves it. The email backup that I thought I made when I set it up, was never sent, although that could have been user error.