Topic: Reusable Receive Addresses (Read 1048 times)

nybble41

full member

Activity: 152

Merit: 100

Quote from: jag2k2 on May 02, 2013, 01:12:37 PM

Receive 3.7 BTC on Address A
Receive 3.3 BTC on Address B
Send 3.25 BTC so the inputs to the transaction were A&B

Why "A&B"? Either A or B would be sufficient by itself, so there is no reason for Electrum to combine them into a single transaction. It probably used the output of the first transaction (address A), sending the remaining ~0.45 to change address C, and left address B alone.

Technically you can still receive BTC on any of your receive addresses, even ones which have already been used as inputs. Some consider it less secure because the full public key is known from the earlier transactions, as opposed to just the hash of the public key which appears in the outputs. Personally I don't think that's worth worrying over.

jag2k2

member

Activity: 62

Merit: 10

If this is electrum specific behavior then my apologies but the question I think is more general. I have been in bitcoin for about a month and in that month my wallet has 5 transactions

Receive 3.7 BTC on Address A
Receive 3.3 BTC on Address B
Send 3.25 BTC so the inputs to the transaction were A&B, the outputs were my destination address and the rest to Address C (Change Address?)
Receive 6.3 BTC on Address D
Receive 0.4 BTC on Address E

The way I see it the sum total of my wallet exists in addresses "C", "D", and "E" correct? What is odd though is that Electrum shows that Address "B" is still a valid receive address but not Address "A". I would expect neither to be valid receive addresses at this point since they are both inputs to another transaction.

Does that make sense? I'm trying to wrap my head around what would happen if I sent bitcoins to Address "B" and why its a valid address when "A" isn't.

Thanks

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