Topic: help for understanding weird transaction (Read 244 times)

thanks for your time, i agree with everything

I thought you were talking about the 600BTC in your previous comment so i was just saying that when he spends .1 BTC from the 600 BTC there's a change of address, but maybe i was out of subject.

I have done some research before posting here and in some examples they could tell right away "this is an exchange" or "this is an atm"  etc... so i was hoping to have some clues here.
From what i know about the guy the two most probable possibilities are a tontine or a very very bad traffic. And i'm not sure what to do.

Well, there is a little mistake here... When you create a new transaction, you use unspent outputs as an input to create new outputs (that's a rather complex phrase   ). When you create a new transaction, you don't HAVE to use all unspent outputs, you can just use one or more to create a transaction, and don't use the rest.
When you do this, there is still some balance left in your old address. You can use the complete value of the unspent outputs you used to create a single new unspent output, or you can send the "leftover" value to either a change address, or use it to fund the initial address.

An example:
So basically, you can have a wallet holding the private key that belongs to the public key whose hash is address "1MyVeryPrivateAddressxxx"
You're so happy you found address 1MyVeryPrivateAddressxxx using vanitygen.exe that you decide to use it for everything: signature payments, bounties, as a deposit address when buying BTC,...
After a while, this address was funded with more than 100 unspent outputs ranging from 1,001 to 0,001 BTC.

Today, you sell 0,5 BTC to your friend. At this point you have a lot of options:
1) you use an unspent output of 0,5001 to send 0,5 to your friend with a 0.001 fee. At this point, you'll still have 99 unspent outputs funding your address 1MyVeryPrivateAddressxxx, you'll see one transaction with 1 input and one output using 1 of your unspent outputs, no change address is ever used

2) you use an unspent output of 1,001, to create a transaction with 2 outputs: 0,5 funding your friends address, 0,5 funding your address, a fee of 0,001. The change address can either be a new address, or your own address. If it's a change address, 99 unspent outputs are left for 1MyVeryPrivateAddressxxx, if you used 1MyVeryPrivateAddressxxx there are still 100 unspent outputs, but the balace did decrease with 0,5001

3) you can use a combination of many smaller unspent outputs, either their sum is exactly 0,50xx (you'll need a bigger fee when you use multiple inputs), or a little over 0,50xx (in this case you'll use a change address)

'4) you can use all unspent outputs, generate a huge transaction with 2 outputs: 0,5 to your friend, the rest to either a new change address or to 1MyVeryPrivateAddressxxx

5) anything in between can also be done

I see, you are worried about the use case.
But yes, looking at the values, this is quite some money today. I know that exchanges take of a lot of their inputs into cold storage.
But as the previous op said, without knowing the details, it is highly speculative.

when you send bitcoins you get a new address for the remaining bitcoins in your wallet

what i don't get is that guy sends money to many addresses with huge amounts of BTC , sometimes they disappear

yeah maybe i look stupid here, and should move the post to freak beginners  who worry for nothing

Are you sure those addresses belong to him? I'm just brainstorming here: but it's also possible he's using an exchange or an online wallet or something (and you're just looking at the exchange/online wallet's funds moving around). Or maybe he's a gambler that immediately deposits any funds you send him to his deposit address on a gambling website, which then moves the funds to their hot wallet?
Maybe he always gives you an address from a mixing service, and you're just monitoring the mixing process while his true addresses remain private?

What i've learnt is that it's very difficult to draw conclusions based on blockchain analysis without knowing the full picture beforehand.

if you follow the 600 BTC in the first transaction here https://blockexplorer.com/address/14jgkqa5WB23BWYJHk6ZDiTazH1hyLEQCV
 you'll see they are sent to a new address every hour, over and over

this is just one chunk of money among many others linked to the same guy

i don't think knowing the theory more can explain me who am doing business with and i prefer to be sure

i know the theory but going from theory to practice isn't always straight

if i ask this question here it's because i have been involved with this guy and if you look further you see that huge amonts are moved pretty often using the same paterns

are you saying it's just normal to have a thousand entries and one receiver that seems to move 200 btc ton many different addresses

then same patern repeat every month with that business

it is simply a very large tx with many, many inputs, sent to a single output. A typical usecase can be imagined this way:
you have a shop, where you sell daily products against bitcoins to your never changing bitcoin address, and at the year end (after 1000 or more tx) you consolidate everything into cold storage... of course hundreds of more thinkable use cases.
These type of tx are quite normal, just here the size is tremendous.

To get an idea how tx work, you may want to look into bitcoin.org (into the developper section), or I recommend the book "Mastering Bitcoin" from Andreas, which is also online available.

this is how Bitcoin works.
(you should ask such questions in "Beginners & Help" section)

Could someone explain me what means such transactions with many entries and one address receiving ?
https://blockexplorer.com/tx/fc8c2a537511e868c5017e2c9570d57aede4352a6e891951456642e1056428fe