Topic: IF I SEND BTC TO A FRIEND/FAMILY, DOES IT MEAN THEY CAN KNOW MY WALLET BALANCE? - page 3. (Read 527 times)

In short, only if you stored all your bitcoin in the one address.

If you distribute them to different bitcoin addresses, then only some of your balance will be discovered (some online wallets/platforms give you only one address as explained in the replies above).

That is not a "wallet", it is an "account". Not to mention that you don't even own bitcoin when you store it with a third party, be it an exchange or a custodial wallet like Coibase. You just have a "promise" that the company that holds your bitcoins would give it to you whenever you asked, while they can refuse to for any arbitrary reason.
But you are right, since custodial "accounts" use their own "mixed" coins to fulfill the promise of converting the IOUs to bitcoin, it is not possible to see the user's balance.

If it is an exchange wallet, it will be difficult to track your transaction on that wallet. Based on my experience, the deposit transaction from another wallet to our wallet in an exchange cannot be checked. This can be safe for you if you don't want your friends or your family to know your wallet balance. But if you use Metamask or MEW wallet, your transaction can be tracked.

It all depending on the structure of your wallet.

Imagine you have 1 address 1xxx that received 1 BTC one time. You have no choice but to use it and anyone receiving coins from you could assume that you had 1 BTC.

Now imagine that you received 0.25 BTC to the same 1xxx address 4 times. Sending someone 0.1 BTC would require only one of those outputs, but it would still reveal the rest of the outputs of the same address, and it will be practically like the first case.

Now imagine you received 0.25 BTC four times, but into a unique address every time. Now if you send your friend 0.1 BTC, they will only know that you owned 0.25 BTC and not know about the three other 0.25 BTC  coins. However, your friend will know about your 0.15 BTC change, and if you will later use it together with the other 0.25 BTC coins (for example to send someone 0.35 BTC), they will learn about them.

To have good privacy you need to use mixing services and manually select coins (UTXO - unspent transaction output) when you make a transaction.

^ BTC transaction was designed for having transparency and this is not all anonymity, it is pseudonymous. Once your identity is linked to that address your identity will be exposed and you can hide all your transactions not unless you will use third-party tools that can mix your coin before sending it to the destination that wants to hide, like suggested above it was a BTC mixer. All information in your wallet will be exposed too once they know what wallet address you have used. But I don't understand what is forfeited, no one can get it if that is your coin, remember always store your BTC in a wallet where you own the private key.

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I think if you just want to hide your balance from a family member who isn't a tech guy, you can just transfer a small amount to another address and then make a second transaction to the family member.

This first transaction will most likely "hide" your total balance, and people wnt be looking past transactions unless they really want to track you.
Ofc that is not the best way to have privacy, and the best is to use a bitcoin mixer. 

But I think it depends  on how much privacy you really want to achieve.

What do you mean by forfeited?
If that's your balance then yes, exactly it moved after it was sent. Whereas the transaction details history will never be forfeited from the blockchain, it is immutable.

If you use your own stand alone wallet, then indeed, it doesn't matter where you send funds to, the recipient will know the sender address. And all the transactions related to any address are publicly visible on any block explorer. But if you were careful, used separate addresses for various needs, didn't mix them, used different change address for all transactions and so on then the recipient will see only a tiny part of "the story".
So it depends a lot how you've used the wallet.

If you use an online wallet, it basically depends on how it's done. The custodian wallets are basically accounts on a platform and you don't really know where the funds are sent from when you make a transaction (may be or may not be that much related to you).

If you want to be on the safe side, you can indeed consider all info as visible.
Bitcoin is not anonymous.


The usual solutions for this are:
* use of mixers (if you do please make sure it's a reputed one and you've read the FAQ page first)
* try to lose track by exchanging the coins into something else and back (but fees and possibly KYC apply)
* send Monero or such, i.e. coins designed for anonymity (which I don't really think that's what you want in this case)

Yes, they can see the address(es) which sent them bitcoin.

It depends. They can certainly see all the transactions you have made from that addresses, but not necessarily that wallet.

Most wallets are a collection of addresses. These addresses are not intrinsically linked to each other, and simply knowing one address in a wallet does not let someone deduce which other addresses belong to that wallet. If you use two or more addresses together in the same transaction, though, then that's a pretty strong indication that they are part of the same wallet.

For example. Let's say you send some coins from Address A and Address B to me in a single transaction. Most people seeing that transaction would rightly assume that Address A and Address B belonged to the same person. Next week, you send some other coins from Address A to a family member. That family member can see that Address A belongs to you, so can look back and see the other transactions which Address A has made, and be able to deduce that Address B also belongs to you. If next week you send some coins from a new address, Address C, to someone else, then your family member won't know about that address or transaction, unless you later link it back to either Address A or Address B.

The other possibility is that you make a transaction from Address D, and receive some coins back as change to Address E. If you later send those coins from Address E to your family member, then they might be able to work out that they were change from Address D, and link Address D back to you as well.

The simple answer is if you don't want anyone knowing about your other transactions, then never reuse addresses and be careful about spending change.

If I transfer BTC to a friend/family, they now know my wallet address, correct? Does this mean they can see all the transactions I have done from that wallet? It seems like wallet information is public except for identity, but that would be forfeited once I make a transfer, right?