Topic: HD wallets = privacy? - page 2. (Read 2375 times)

bter:
7170 BTC got stolen from our cold wallet in this transaction:
https://blockchain.info/tx/f5b0363f03e1ed8bb812c135361ea93590c831ce9f13a3750be1b93575baccc6

if those coins move into your wallet and you try to sell on an exchange, you will be suspect no 1.
bitcoin's transactions are a public ledger, everybody sees where the coins are moving

Edit: "suspect" is a very weak word... it's like you have big pile of cocaine at home and try to tell the cops you know nothing about it

I have no way of knowing they are stolen. I can trace the transactions (well, as a matter of fact, I don't know how), but that will just be an assumption ready than irrefutable truth.

uhmm can you give example of at least one seller? i have never seen one on forum

Would you buy bitcoins stolen from bter or mtgox for the same price as coins on exchanges? There are sellers out there....
I believe you can get a decent discount

Please explain why Bitcoin is not fungible.

LOL, nope, bitcoin is not 100% fungible. Does that mean bitcoin is not a proper form of money? Nope.
I like bitcoin's traceability as much as I like ring signature's untraceability.
Monero in your definition is proper money but I don't think it will be bigger than bitcoin. Bitcoins are just better for some things and more easily regulated, I think governments will support bitcoin because of this traceability and a perfectly readable public ledger.

Why is this false, then?

You combine just enough funds from different addresses to pay for what you need and send the change to a new address. No one can monitor your total holdings. That is what OP wants.

Its not per se better, but it is more flexible.


I personally dont trust blockchain.info very much, so this might very well be bias on my end.


Yes, but when you want to spend them you might have to combine inputs from several addresses, which would like addresses together.

Bitcoins, like any proper form of money, are 100% fungible.

There's no such thing as “crime coins”. There are crimes, and there are coins, but coins are not capable of committing crimes.

Partial privacy can be achieved by receiving funds into a new address every time. All your bitcoins are spread out across a hundred addresses and no one can monitor your total holdings. This is how Satoshi envisioned it.

What if the coins you re receiving are crime coins? im paranoid about that.

More privacy would probably result in using a wallet that allows for proper coin control. That is a wallet that allows you to specify which addresses that you want to use to sign a particular transaction.

You would essentially want to make sure that you receive no more then one payment into each address and when yo go to spend your coins you want to use no more then one address to send the coins from and use a newly generated address as your change address.

You will eventually end up with a lot of addresses with small inputs so you will need to figure out a way to combine inputs without sacrificing privacy. This is usually where mixers come into play

So you're saying I could use a mixing service or an exchange in place of the "private" wallet?  Why would that be better?

Also Blockchain's Shared Coin uses CoinJoin which (from what I can gather) is a (nearly?) trustless method for mixing which gives it an advantage over a conventional mixing service or exchange.

Yeah, what about it?

Monero

Ill quote the post here, to keep it clear.


This should work, but I think you can skip the "private" wallet as it only acts as an intermediary between your "main" wallet and your "public" wallet. The idea behind this was probably that you have to use a bc.i account in order to use shared coin/send, but you can skip this step by using a mixing service or any other high volume wallet. E.g. a big casino/exchange could act as a mixer. The BTC you deposit is usually used for the withdrawal request from someone else and your withdrawal will come from an esentially random input from someone else as well. Another point that speaks for mixing serivce - be it an actual mixer or something that is just used as one - IMHO is that you can use different services from time to time. This will further complicate things for someone that is trying to make sense of your finances.

My what an excellent grasp you have.   Thank you for enlightening me.

I'm trying to figure out a way to spend BTC without tying my main wallet to my transactions.  Should this do it:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.10453447

Lets say you create a new address for every time you receive bitcoins (as you should and I hope most of us do). You receive several inputs[1] over time, e.g. like below.

0.00369522 and 0.003 on address A
0.10, 0.05 and 0.05 on address B

Now you want to spend 0.2 BTC (and add a fee). For this you will need inputs that you received via A and B. The inputs you received via B are enough for 0.2, but you still need to pay a fee, so you need another input and will also need a change address. When you create a transaction like that the addresses are considered to be related and its commonly accepted that they belong to the same person even though it is possible that several people create a single transaction. On top of that usually you cant cherry pick the inputs either the wallet will just pick them for you, AFAIK Coin Control for bitcoin core/qt is the exception to that. It lets you pick each input before you create a transaction.
You can obfuscate this by using a mixer.


tl;dr you can use different addresses to receive bitcoins, but you have a limited control over the "sending" address.


[1] A transaction is spending formerly received coins (inputs). These inputs have to be spend entirely. If your inputs are higher than your output(s) a wallet will generate a change address for you for the rest. If the inputs have been received on different addresses they appear in blockexplorers as the sending addresses even though technically addresses can not send bitcoins. Example: https://www.blocktrail.com/BTC/tx/b07a2b5647621789d95ae456f3f71f7034fb820e921d9f2e4fea7a3db8b733b9
this TX spends two inputs into two outputs.