Topic: Is it possible to transfer BTC between addresses in the same wallet? (Read 3678 times)

For security reasons?

If you have a large amount of bitcoin in one address, you might want to break it up into smaller pieces.
If a hacker or scammer using block explorer sees you have a large amount of funds in one address, it could make it an attractive target for them.

It is possible but why would you want to do that?
Only thing I can think of is from a topik I was looking at the other day something about double spending.
But don't think it will work for you anyways.

Yes but why would you it will cost you a fee and it aint 1 penny anymore. ?

Thanks for the explanatory answers.
I liked the way the wallets work. The total balance in the wallet is the amount of bitcoin I can use.
It would not be easy to use wallet if it had only been sent from one address.

I have done this a  couple of times in my blockchain.info wallet but since it costs a little, I have never done it again. I just let my different wallets receive up to a certain amount and if I feel like selling them, I just send them to my local exchange and convert it to fiat. I have not tried other online wallets so I can’t say if the same is the case with them. Blockchain.info now also makes new addresses for you every so often, but the old addresses ceated before can still receive, sort of like their way of making more secure transactions.

Great.  Glad to hear it.


I'm not sure why you care.  Like I said, in most cases it isn't a very meaningful question.  However, I think I just answered that question, didn't I?

It depends on your wallet.


That depends on how much you transfer and which wallet you are using.  The wallet gets to decide.
It might be A.
It might be B.
It might be C.
It might be A and B.
It might be A and C.
It might be B and C.
It might be A, B, and C.


The wallet would choose multiple payments to spend. It would choose enough payments so that the sum is at least 0.8 BTC (plus any transaction fee you might want to pay).

So, given the A, B, and C that you mentioned earlier...
It might be A and C (for a total of 0.8 BTC)
It might be B and C (for a total of 0.9 BTC)
It might be A, B, and C (for a total of 1.0 BTC)

If the amount chosen is more than the sum of the amount you are sending plus the transaction fee, then the transaction will have two outputs (one for the intended payment, and another to send the extra back to your wallet).

Is there a logic like this when sending bitcoin? Does not the total amount of bitcoin in my wallet be my total balance?

What would happen if I tried to send 0.75 BTC?

I understand the invoice example. Bitcoin addresses are not account numbers. Bitcoin addresses are more like invoice numbers. Ok.

Yes, that's what I really want to learn. "Which of the payments previously received will be spent?"

I transferred BTC from my wallet to D. The wallet decided according to its own algorithm. Bitcoin transfer to address D has been performed.
Now, when I check address D at blockchain.info, which one will appear as the transfer address? A, B, C ?

Also would I have a problem if I wanted to transfer 0.8 BTC? I have a total of 1 BTC in my wallet. But none of the addresses in the wallet have 0.8 BTC. What would happen in such a situation?

I also have the same situation but compared to you i only have two address. I am using blockchain.info wallets and I am the fixed address and the changing address. But there are actually two wallets that there is on my account. In my experience there are options as to where will you charge the bitcoins that you will send. You can select from where or which wallet are you going to will take from.

yes whenever i tap on receive button on blockchain i get different address and and money used to get allocated in various wallet address and finally to buy something i had to transfer  all bitcoin to one address but it takes transaction charge for me. And its really irritating for me.

Its possible with Blockchain.info, haven't experienced with other wallets providing the same feature. Personally this feature is not used as its just to help us transact from different bitcoin addresses.

this is a difficult and interesting questions. we often do not notice his wallet in it. after reading your topic, I suddenly felt more curious. I think we should do the experiment with it. I'll be quite happy if we can find the answers. Let's do it

It is not problem in wallet like coinbase, blockchain.info. You can easily switch your BTC between ur addresses with fee 10000 satoshi.

I've been doing this on the blockchain wallet since I was a newbie because from what my understanding is, bitcoin addresses are unique individual receivers and senders of transactions that can be grouped into a wallet but grouping them into a single wallet does not restrict or hinder them for keeping that uniqueness at the end of the day. Besides, a single address receives one certain tx but the rest of the addresses in the wallet does not receive what address A received.

Likewise but as far as i observed, one wallet has many addresses. So in that case, it is very possible to transfer btc in the same wallet yet different addresses. But whats the point if the owner transfers btc to his own wallet? Just wondering haha

I don't get to think in wich case someone would need to send bitcoin to an adress wich belong to the same wallet ? It's like your have money in your left pocket but you feel better to transfer the money in your pocket of the right side... I missed something or ?

although i do not have any experience of that but my general view is that it may be possible because when you generate a new address which belong to your previous wallet. so there may not be any difficulties while transferring bitcoin to the same wallet.

although i do not have any experience of that but my general view is that it may be possible because when you generate a new address which belong to your previous wallet. so there may not be any difficulties while transferring bitcoin to the same wallet.

What will happen if MPK ever get discovered or someone followed the transaction?

I think this does not work anymore in Coinbase. I tried a few months ago and got a message telling me this is an address on my own wallet. Anyway, if you are using Coinbase, it doesn't really matter which address the bitcoin is. Even if you don't do anything, the bitcoin in the address will eventually transferred away and the balance you have in your Coinbase account is what you entrust Coinbase with.

This is something I have also tried doing but I couldnt even get an headway. I have a new address added and funded it now I want to transfer from that new wallet to previous wallet but what I noticed was it seems the money didnt move out and I have had difficulty in this. For those who were able to perform this on blockchain.info kindly give the steps necessary to make this happen...

Yes it is possible, i've tried this on my coinbase wallet out of curiosity. I have 5 addreses there and the 4 of them wasn't been used for a long time. I'm wondering if it still works so i use the same wallet to send to the 4 addresses. I send the minimum amount to 4 of them to see if it will still can receive and yes, my experimentation succeed.

In past blockchain.info have feature to send out bitcoin with multiple bitcoin address to single bitcoin address in one transaction but it is not possible this days. But if you have all of this four addresses imported in blockchain.info wallet than you will have ability to send out bitcoin from one address to another.

Both A and B don't have enough bitcoin to send out 0.5BTC so It should be address C. If you send 0.5BTC from C to D you will have following input and output.

C 0.70BTC ---------> C 0.20BTC
                         D 0.50BTC

Why would you want to transfer bitcoin from one address to the other within the same wallet?. I don't think it makes sense given that some fees will be charged at the end of the day.

Yes. Technically you have a lot of addresses in a wallet but if you check out wallet Explorer you'll see which ones actually have balances. Now if you have all of your inputs in one address you won't want to send them to that same address (even if it's possible). You can definitely send funds from 1 address to another. It's still two seperate addresses.


The only way that saves you any Satoshis are if you see fees are low on a certain day so you send a low priority transaction, say 10 or 20 sat/byte. Either way you'll have to pay for X amount of tiny inputs at some point.

Of course, the sweep will require a large transaction that will either require that large fee or will take a very long time to confirm.  Then when you use the bitcoins again later, you'll have to pay transaction fees again.

The only benefit you'll get is that you'll shift WHEN you pay the fee and wait a long time for confirmation rather than having it happen to you when you NEED the transaction to confirm quickly.

the main reason you would want to do this is if one address as a bunch of tiny inputs. like say you mined bitcoin on that address..
after awhile, if you wanted to buy something with that address you would have so many small inputs you would have a large tx..

sweeping that wallet to a new address combines all those inputs into one bigger one.. so when you want to buy something you dont have such a huge tx and therefor your tx will confirm faster with a lower fee..

Offcourse it's possible, as others already said. Personally, I have never tried to do it. And I don't understand point of it. If these addresses are connected to your wallet, you have one main ballance. If you send coins from wallet to address D, you will only need to pay transaction fee, but your coins will remain on your main ballance.

I think having many addresses are for many account too. one account for one address. probably farming. imo. but if those addresses are for farming, a few people can detect that those addresses from the same wallet. but if you want to just make it cool to have many addresses or to differenciate your income, it does not matter anyway.

i think we can not saving the transaction fee because every time we send the amount of bitcoin, the transaction is made for the miners, this is what i know and what i read. to send some amount into your other wallet is need transaction fee too so i think you can send the amount into every wallet address you want but you need to pay the fee too.

tbh I didn't know it was possible, I was avoiding to do that since it takes fees to transfer to my own wallet and I've tried everything and didn't find a way to do it.

I also want to know how you did that can you please let us know about that,
It will help us in saving the tx fee we waste to send to our own addresses.

Yes.


Bitcoin is NOT sent FROM ADDRESSES.  It is sent TO ADDRESSES.

Bitcoin addresses are NOT account numbers. They are more like an invoice number.  They provide you a way to determine who sent the money, when they sent it, and why they sent it.

If you were a merchant and you sold 4 items to 3 different people, then you sent each customer a different invoice to be paid:

Invoice A: $0.20
Invoice B: $0.10
Invoice C: $0.70

The total amount that your business would receive once all payments were received would be $1.00.

Then if you sent $0.50 from your checking account to your savings account, the $0.50 would be sent from which invoice?

It's a silly question, isn't it?  It isn't sent "from" an invoice.

Now, you could keep track of the individual payments and store them all separately (like a bitcoin wallet does).  Then when you spend it, you could choose specific coins to spend (like a bitcoin wallet does).  In that case, you could say that this money being spent was RECEIVED as part of a specific invoice.  You aren't "spending from" the invoice, but you can be aware of specifically which invoice payment provided the units you are using.

If that's what you are asking:
Which of the payments previously received will be spent?

Then the answer is:
It depends on your wallet.  The wallet gets to choose which of the unspent transaction outputs to spend.  The creator of the wallet implements an algorithm for making that decision.  Some wallets also provide advanced features commonly called "coin control" which allow the user to specify which unspent transaction outputs they want to spend.

While you can do it, as you have seen from the posts preceding this one, why would you want to do that?  All those addresses come from the same SEED and/or all share the same master public key.  In fact on most of the better wallets when you send coins from one of your addresses, ANY coins left in the sending coin address are automatically moved to a new "change" address (Electrum as example).  Still, I can visualize why you might want to move coins from a publicly available address where you repeatedly receive coins.  There is NO harm in simply moving them to another address in the same wallet.  Just remember that all those addresses are mathematically related, should the MPK ever get discovered, OR if someone does a trace through the blockchain to follow your transactions from that one initial address.  You may not care about this, but for some, this it a factor worth consideration.  Just sayin!!

Yes it's possible to do in blockchain I've done it few times to transfer my all coins in different address to one.

It's possible in blockchain wallet. I have multiple address there and I can tranfer funds among address without any problems. Even the fee is smaller compared to transfering funds to address outside the wallet. I think that some other wallets have this functionality too.

You can do this with wallets like Bitcoin Core. Click on "enable coin control" or something like that, something that says coin control I think under advanced tab. Then you get all the inputs and outputs. So you can send with only one output or various. Its a bit non userfriendly but after you use it a couple times its easier. I wish this was able to be used in a more dumbed down way for noobs since its obvious we want to know how the transaction will look like since the blockchain is open and we dont want certain addresses to be linked with other addresses in a single transaction.

I've been curious of this as well.

There is more than one address in a wallet. We can receive different payments using these addresses. But all the pays are in the same wallet. When we make an address payment, we will send our through which address.

For example, MyWallet is my purse. I have my A, B, C, D addresses in this wallet.

A: 0.2 BTC
B: 0.1 BTC
C: 0.7 BTC
D: 0 BTC

MyWallet: 1 BTC

I want to send the address bitcoin to D. Now when I write address D in my wallet, 0.5 BTC will be sent from which address.