I am new to bitcoin. I created a wallet on blockchain.info and have received a few payments.
The problem is that I have no way of telling who sent them.
If I could find the destination wallet address it was sent to, then I could in theory give each person a different address, and when the transaction came in I could figure out who it came from.
The problem with this is that when I click on the information field blockchain provides about the transaction, it gives me a huge list of addresses from that block. How do I know which specific address out of a block is the address that was used to trigger payment to my account? I need a system that I can track by hand, maybe in an Excel file. I am not looking for a programmatical solution, and I can't check every included address to see if it might be one of mine.
Can anyone educate me on how this is supposed to work, and how I can track who is sending what? I've tried using slightly different amounts to represent each person, but due to the variability in the USD/BTC exchange rate that doesn't work so well when 2 people are sending close to the same amount. (Most amounts are under $10, so there isn't much differentiation.) Since most people are sending me money from Coinbase, I tried asking them to fill in the Notes descriptor on that site, until I realized that Coinbase doesn't forward those notes into the transaction.
I ask people to email and sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, but even if they do I really have no way of knowing if they are being honest. I apologize if I am just supposed to know how this works, but as I said, I just started and don't know the terminology yet or what I am supposed to ask.
I am not looking for an API. I just want to check manually using online tools.
Thank you for any advice on how to do this.
I don't really understand what is actually going on here, maybe send a few screenshots to show what you mean by the part I have highlighted?
For me, if you just go log into your blockchain.info account, and then you go to transactions, you are able to see the address that is received with and address that sent the transaction. That should be enough since blockchain.info generates a new receiving address every time you receive(I think).
If you can't see the receiving address, then you can click on the transaction, click on the button next to transaction confirmed, and then it'll redirect to the blockchain.info transaction page.
Hope this helps, let me know if you need anything else.