Topic: IF I SEND BTC TO A FRIEND/FAMILY, DOES IT MEAN THEY CAN KNOW MY WALLET BALANCE? (Read 527 times)

sure, they can see your balance, your transaction, and all thing history from your wallet, because bitcoin running in blockchain, its mean we can see all the information about the wallet. but if you dont have the private key, you will never can access it. so if you dont want to makes your friend or family now about your balance, just use the exchanger to send to them

Sure bro, they can scan your wallet via explorer and see what you got. This was how my friend and I tracked down a scammer who assembled a failed bitcoin mining machine for us in 2017, he was suppose to refund our money, he complained of been bankrupt but we tracked his previous bitcoin wallet and he has done over 40 BTC transactions and was holding 23BTC, when we confronted him with this evidence, he went into hiding although we later go to know he was into heavy gambling.

All the balances and transaction history are publicly available. Your identity, however, isn't. If the ones you sent your coins to knows you personally, they can associate the address from which the funds came from to you, and they can tell that to everyone else as well or keep it to themselves. If you trust the ones who you will send your money to, I think this should be a non issue anymore.

Another way to do this would be to use a different passphrase but the same seed phrase for each different wallet. That way, you don't have to resort to hot wallets and can have all your coins protected by the security of your hardware wallet, while still keeping them in entirely separate wallets.

In order: No, maybe, yes, and yes.

If I know one of the addresses from your Ledger wallet, and you haven't linked that address with any other addresses in a common transaction, then there is no way to link that address to any of your other addresses only through blockchain evidence, block explorers, etc.

However, if you use Ledger Live, then you connect to Ledger's servers and you send their servers a list of all the addresses in your wallet to receive the transaction history and updated balance, so Ledger can easily see all the addresses in your wallet. You can avoid this if you don't use Ledger Live, but if you substitute it with Electrum, for example, then whoever is running the Electrum server(s) you connect to will now see all your addresses in the exact same way. If you want to avoid this altogether, then you need to run your own node/server and connect to that instead.

If you connect to a third party server as above, be that Ledger, Electrum, or someone else, then that data can absolutely be shared with the government or any other third party. Also, if someone has infected your computer with malware, then they could similarly link your addresses when you connect your wallet.

Yes, when you are sending on a wallet like Bitcoin core. Electrum and other non custodial but if you do sent out on an exchange address then it cant really be traced up.

Dont know what you do mean about forfeited because balances cant really be touched nor be stolen from you as long you do hold your own private key of the said wallet.

They could know the wallet balance of yours but they do know that you are the ones been holding into?

I've had a question in my mind for a long time: Can someone somehow figure out the other BTC or ETH addresses of a ledger wallet?

Let me explain: Imagine someone gets 10 addresses from his ledger nano S, and he uses some of those addresses. Now, if someone else knows that address 1 belongs to that guy, can he somehow figure out the other 9 addresses belong to him? Does ledger themselves know? Can the government know about it? Can a hacker or a skilled programmer figure it out somehow?

And obviously I don't mean the simple case where they share transactions. They don't have any common Tx'.

Most people don't really give attention to the spend from one specific address and that is why the dust attacks are still happening to trace the wallet balance it can be only avoided by freezing the particular address if we are using the non custodial wallet. But still there is a possibility to trace if the inputs are coming from multiple addresses so we can assume that it belongs to same wallet, sorry if I am kind of messed with because whenever I am talking technically I get confused what I am really trying to say 

Yes they will know your wallet address since you are the sender but if the receiver doesn't know anything crypto related then he will not know your address .
Since there is a thing called "blockchain" which acts as an online ledger then they will see all of your transactions unless you will use mixers.
That is the reason why Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous because they can still track the owner.

If you don't want to forfeit and want to make your identity to be private, just use another address to send money to them though they can still track you if they will try to track that address' transaction. Maybe just use mixers so that you can keep yourself private whenever you will send BTC to your family or friends.

They will know for sure unless if they don't have knowledge on how to trace the transactions. And if they got the interest about your wallet and wanted to know how much inside.

But if you were sending it indirectly like using mixing services, that gonna be impossible. Well, I suggest you use that if you wanted to keep your wallet anonymous from your friends/family members. However, it wasn't a problem if they know, you should be proud of it and likely they give thanks to you back then.

Well, you should in theory have several different wallets for different purposes. So say that you have a hardware wallet for all of your Pornhub subscription payments (joke) ...then do not send any coins from that wallet to your friends and family. You can have an Electrum wallet for all the family and friends stuff... (with only a small amount of coins, if you want to fool them)

I push my coins through a popular Mixer services before I transfer it to one of my wallets.. so nobody can trace it back to my main hoard.  Yea, you pay some fees for that, but it is totally worth it for your financial privacy. 

There is no such thing as a "Wallet ID" when it comes to the bitcoin protocol. Any centralized service which provides you with a "Wallet ID" is simply using it to process logins to their website or system. It is not recorded anywhere on the blockchain. Further, knowing a single address from one wallet does not allow you to calculate any of the other addresses within that wallet. You might be able to work out (with some assumptions) other connected addresses by looking at different addresses being used as inputs together in the same transaction, but if someone is careful not to link addresses in this way, then you might not be able to tell anything at all.

I would never recommend using an exchange as a surrogate mixer. Unlike a good mixer, all centralized exchanges track your IP address, your deposits and withdrawals, perform blockchain analysis to see where your coins come from and where they go, and link all that information together to sell or share with third parties. Using an exchange might prevent your family member from identifying your wallet, but it gives you much worse privacy overall, not to mention the additional risks you accept of having your coins frozen or seized.

Yes I think they can see your balance if they scan your wallet. I think next time you wonna avoid this, it is better to send them crypto asset from an exchange wallet.

As someone earlier mentioned in the public discuss that using exchange wallet to hide your identity from a family is like being penny wise but pounds foolish. Exchanges can provide your identity to any body or individual and they can even do worse with it.
If the OP is concerned about forfeiting his identity by that I guess he means exposing his account balance to his family members, he can simply operate from different bitcoin wallet. By that his bitcoin total balance will be his secret.

Not only you, Everyone who have the transection id can know about your wallet balance. Because its easy to check anyone's wallet address through tx id.
Its better to use an exchange wallet to send someone with full privacy.Then they will not be able to trace your balance anymore.

Even this way the receiver can easily track where the bitcoin comes from and he may be able to know all your transactions and think you are a wealthy person  
The only way to hide your assets is to use a bitcoin mixer or if you are intelligent enough you can make use of exchange to act as a mixer for you.

By the way, if OP has lot of bitcoins, its advisable to divide and keep them in separate wallets.

mixers are the best way to keep them from seeing the contents of your wallet. Actually there are several ways other than that, but the method is quite inconvenient, like having 2 wallets. the first wallet is for savings purposes, while the second wallet is for transactions. well, even though he could send assets from wallet 1 to 2, and still be tracked, he just had to prepare an excuse for that. This is the same as an exchange, only the difference lies in the fee. the fee on the exchange may be higher, but it is safer. while sending from wallet to wallet is still at risk of being caught, it's just that the fee is less. well, if you don't want to bother like that, mixers are the best way.

Bitcoin blockchain is publicly available so anyone have your address can enter into the blockchain explorers and find the history of the address, remaining balance and all and to the extreme it is also possible to find the wallet ID and find all other addresses belongs to that wallet if I am not wrong. So if you don't want anyone to know your address then you have to mix the coins before sending for that lot of ways are available or simply you can send funds from an exchange so that they will never know your personal address.

Yes, as per the indications above there are options with mixers to mix up your address and in a way make it indistinguishable. That's a bonus working with Bitcoin also.

In a normal transaction once they receive the transfer they'll obviously see your address and if they wanted to they can check it on the explorer to see everything you've done with that address what went out. what came in, current balance. That's the beauty of blockchain transparency

Mixer may be more effective, and more concise. I have never used a Mixer but it looks like the mixer is able to scramble your transaction address, if a see on several articel about mixer. So he doesn't need to create a new address, save the prifat key and seed. It may be a risk like you said, but I think I have several alternative wallets to store assets. Another problem is the cost, there will be additional costs if you have assets on the main wallet and sent on the second wallet that is used to send to your brother. Sometimes if busy network also needs more cost.

your family or relatives can easily find out your assets if you use the main wallet as the sender. If you want to avoid publicizing your assets, you can send them using a third-party exchange, because the exchange's wallet will not show your assets personally because there are a lot of assets collected there. it is slightly better to avoid tracking on your personal wallet.