Topic: send to receiving address and still spend coins? (Read 421 times)

thnx for the help, my understanding has grown

So far so good.  You received some bitcoins using an address.  Then you spent those bitcoins, and the change was received using another address.


Correct.  That's because bitcoin addresses are not account numbers.  They are more like invoice numbers.  The exist as a way to track who paid you, when they paid you, and what they paid you for.  After that the bitcoins are under control of your "wallet" because of the private keys that the wallet has.  Since your wallet has the private keys that are associated with both bitcoin addresses, it shows a balance of all the bitcoins that are received using either of the addresses.


Addresses aren't really used to send payments.  They are used to receive payments.  If you ran a business, and sold some items to a customer and gave them an invoice number of 12345 so you could track when the invoice was paid, you wouldn't then say that you were spending from invoice 12345 when you bought more supplies.  You'd just take all the cash from all the invoices that were paid and put it all in the wallet in your back pocket.  Then later, you'd pull some of that cash out of your "wallet" and spend it.  You wouldn't track which dollars you were spending came from which invoice.

You CAN re-use the invoice number (sorry, I mean bitcoin address) if you want, but you could also just generate a new invoice number (oops, I mean bitcoin address) for every payment you receive.  As long as your bitcoin wallet has the private keys that are associated with each of the addresses, all the bitcoins will be under the control of that wallet.


Much like re-using an invoice number, it might make it a bit confusing for you determine in the future which payment was received for what purpose, but other than that it's just another payment to the wallet.  Since the wallet has the private keys, it doesn't really care if you are re-using invoice numbers (I mean bitcoin addresses) or not.

Addresses are used to receive bitcoin, but they can not make transactions.


That is common, yes.


A wallet holds private keys for many addresses. It shows you the overall amount of bitcoin you can spend with those private keys.


Yes and No. Yes you can still receive bitcoin on the address. You should not though, for privacy sake. You can not however "Send" bitcoins "from" an address. For one this is not how bitcoins work, even though blockchain explorers like blockchain.info tend to show it like this. You use what is called inputs. Inputs are transactions you received in the past. If you are using bitcoin core and want to control the "from" address you should enable coin control.


No, its just another address.

1. Yes, you can still use it. But you won't be able to send using it if the address doesn't have bitcoins (duh).
2. No, it won't be a problem.

As long as your wallet still have the private keys of those 2 addresses, you can use any of them.

address abc123 is receiving, made some transactions.
coins are now in a change address abZ321 as shown when you follow abc123's transactions on blockchain.info.

bitcoincore wallet shows correct balance, even tho coins are not in abc123.

can i still use abc123 to receive and SEND payments, even tho the coins no longer reside there?
i also used abZ321 to receive coins by accident, is that a problem in the future??