Bitcoin Forum

Can we find out which online wallet a particular bitcoin address belongs to?I keep my coins at blockchain.info and some coins at Zebpay,Is it possible for someone to identify which address belongs to which of above wallet or any wallet?

Well if you post your address blatantly on the internet
Yes, it's possible to link it to your ID to your wallet
Like my address that is listed on my profile
By seeing my address, everyone knows that I'm the owner to that address
And if i somehow being a scammer and posted it with my address then everyone would know that i was the scammer
That's why Wallet like Xapo uses Many Address for their user's transactions
To keep them hidden

Correct me if im wrong ;)

You're asking a difficult question that can't be answered with a simple yes or no. Bitcoin is a publicly stored ledger; this means that all the transactions are traceable (a lot of people seem to forget this when they say that Bitcoin is truly anonymous; which it isn't). Now if you're asking whether somebody can determine if address X belongs to service Y, the answer is likely yes. Can somebody determine that the answer is owned by you (identity)? It's possible, but much harder. However, every-time your address directly or indirectly interacts with services on which you're registered on, you leave a bread crumb (a trail). For example, if you are registered somewhere with personal details (ID and such), that service most likely knows a lot of your other addresses (expert users could avoid this or at least make it much more difficult).

If my btc address can be traced to the wallet it belongs to i.e blockchain,xapo etc,I can also be traced because most of these services require some kind of other traceable info at the time of sign up

Nobody is forcing you to use web wallets. Actually it is not recommended to use one. However, keep in mind that those services hold onto your information and you are fine until something bad happens (e.g. hack). If you want more privacy/anonymity you need to use a desktop client (e.g. Electrum). If you want the full experience then you use Bitcoin Core (keep in mind that you have to store the whole blockchain).

When you send Bitcoins from blockchain.info wallet you should see on the public records of the address on blockchain.info, under transaction which sending Bitcoins from that address (red amount) first seen from IP address as blockchain.info, while when you send Bitcoins from Zebpay it should be random IP address.

But if you just received Bitcoins and never spend, you cant say it is blockchain.info wallet address

While that is true for blockchain.info payments I could create a TX and broadcast it via blockchain.info. It would show the same info you described. There are many ways to find things out, but there also ways to obfuscate the information available.

Is the IP address of the person sending a transaction publicly visible? I've noticed there are some ip addresses attached to transactions, but figured they must be from node or pool.

I think as per my knowledge IP address are publicly not visible if a person is sending that will be through the wallet address and wallet dont disclose the IP address. If i am wrong correct me.

No.

That's the IP address of the node that relayed the transaction. It even says on Blockchain.info:"It does not necessarily mean the IP address is the source of the transaction.".

With a lot of effort. What if you were connected to some public Wifi and sent your transaction from there (or used TOR or VPN)? This information can be useless.

As long as you don't do something illegal you should be fine. If you get sued and used an address from an online wallet or exchange then it is likely that everyone can connect the dots and find out that this address belongs to that online wallet. He then you sue you and the police might ask the online wallet owners to provider your details.

But surely you don't want to do illegal things right?  :)

I don't think this could be done because those wallet doesn't have any specific vanity inside the address they generate for you. But if you stake your address somewhere in internet than someone can link those address to your name. If you don't post your address anywhere you are good with your privacy.  ;)

At least website bitcoin addresses can be connected to that websites wallet as long as the website is using a shared wallet. So you have deposit addresses but the addresses you pay from are addresses you can't chose.

I'm not sure how it is done on zebpay.

Wouldn't a desktop client makes it more vulnerable to be traced since finding an ip of a device i.e pc would be much easier?

No, this doesn't make sense. Exactly how do you plan to get the IP address? Even if you did that how would you connect the IP address to a person? What if they were on a public Wi-fi, or using TOR or a VPN?

Depends on the client, an electrum server would have your IP as its your only connection.

My question was in the form of:"How would user X get the IP address of someones transaction?", in the case where user X is not the owner of such a server (for example). It is definitely not "much easier".

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Update: Exactly. This confirms that the statement of the user is false.

Certainly not. If you are just anyone that has a TX ID chances are you will never find the IP of the person that created it. It was more a remark in terms of "desktop wallets are not always more secure".

It depends, wallets can leave some footprints. Default behaviour of your blockchain.info wallet is that change is sent back to the same address you sent from. Your other wallet I don't know. Default satoshi client behaviour is to always create a new change address. If I knew you used Satoshi client and blockchain.info wallets  and had the to ids I could probably tell which one you sent from.

Its not about me.I keep reading here and there every now and then that bitcoin is being increasingly used in illegal activities.I think the only usrs criminals prefer bitcoin is that it cannot be traced and receiver csn cash It out easily any time anywhere.That makes me wonder if there is a way to catch the culprit in such cases.

Unfortunately electrum servers does know much more. They know all the addresses of a wallet and can connect them. They only would need one address to be known belonging to a user and they would know that all these addresses belong to that user.

It is not a good idea to use the autoconnect feature on electrum since you will spread your information over all the servers and you never know if one of them is a not so nice guy.

I wonder if that is there are more wallets of that kind.

Well, I hope there are not many malicious servers but surely someone checked out what he can get. And since the wallet connects to the server it might be good to hide your ip with tor. Works fine for me though I think even when they would not know the real IP, they can know who someone is if he posted one of the addresses connectable to a person and what addresses he has in that wallet.

its impossible,we can't identify wallet based on bitcoin address,its really hard,bitcoin address created with encrypt and not have signature or mark on each addess,its tottaly random,except is wallet create so much vanity addresses for their users.

How did notaek even accept you in a signature campaign ? lol .Coming to the point @Wapinter,its not impossible to know whether the addresses are linked to a particular wallet.The tainted analysis might help if you can establish a severe link between them.Most of the good services like LocalBitcoins has their wallets named on the service name and when you search them,all the addresses will be linked to that particular wallet, "LocalBitcoins" in case of this service. 

Ok, I have no idea how I missed seeing that on Blockchain.info.
But that means that the nodes could actually tie a transaction to the IP address that sent the transaction, right?

Not necessarily. Maybe another node relayed it to the node that relayed it to Blockchain.info. You can't know this. Even if you found the node which first received the transaction, it is not like the node operator would freely give you the information for any reason.

False. Encryption is irrelevant here.

That's why people should use Core. It doesn't even take much space anymore as you can keep it running in pruned mode.

there is no way to connect an address to the user that is using it, this is the anonymous part of bitcoin

but if made 1 wrong move you can by follow the wrong move(one of the address connected with a purchase for example) and go up to the other address that he is using on the same wallet

however if i use multiple wallet(so a diffrent fresh address, which is different than creating new addresses ont he same wallet) each time, the story is different, you will not be able to connect them all

It is not about how to connect an address to user.It is about if an address can be connected to the wallet it belongs to.If we have a address,like 1E35dNx1BCxAzWfLjPu8K3mwWL2hhjD21M can we find out which online wallet it belongs to?

Yes, the wallets basing on that codesbase become more and more attractive though it's still happening too often that the blockchain needs to be redownloaded it seems. Comes up often that problem. Or maybe they fixed it in the meanwhile.

When it would become a deterministic one, maybe at least as an option, then it would be even more attractive in my eyes. I would not like having to use an old backup only to find that some addresses can't be recovered because the backup doesn't include freshly created bitcoin addresses that might already hold coins.

Not long ago I've read a piece of news that one of the IT companies has found a way to analyse the block chain and deanonymze absolutely any address. It was somewhere about November I suppose, will look right now and try to find it. They were going to patent the technology.

Maybe, but that information is kind of useless to them. If somebody determines that your address is coming from e.g. Blockchain.info, what are they going to do with this information? They still don't know who you are and it is not like Blockchain.info would give out any information freely.

Maybe. I haven't run pruned mode myself as I run in 'full mode' and synchronize a few hours before using my wallet.

Backups should be frequent in these cases or you need to properly use coin control and control the input && change address each time.  

Yeah indeed, that sounds pretty logical. I guess one could, in theory, run a huge amount of nodes to de-anonymize part of the transactions, but this would probably not be feasible.
If I'm not mistaken it's somewhat comparable to running exit nodes for the Tor network and use them to de-anonymize the traffic.

I already control it all the time and do regular backups though the standard wallet is different with its creation of new bitcoin addresses. It might happen that an error slowly comes into a wallet, you make backups and backups and only then realize the error. You try to go back but the last backup that does not contain it is pretty old. Happened with electrum at least once so a deterministic wallet is another form of backup that would protect the basic things in a wallet on top of backups.

@eternalgloom


Its even easier, you can just use a Tor browser to connect to one of the services[1] that broadcast transactions for you. I havent tried it over, but at the very least blockchain.info (via their hidden service) will allow it. If you want you can create a new account, post the raw TX in tech support or send me a PM and I (and probably others) will broadcast it for you ASAP. IPs are very easy to detach from transactions.

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@SebastianJu


AFAIK core plans to make the wallet HD in the long run.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_broadcasting

That's great. I think I simply have read too many threads of people that didn't realize that they could lose privkeys or/and actually lost bitcoins because of a backup that was slightly too old.

its impossible. so far i never find some wallet or exchange that use vanity bitcoin address to all their bitcoin address,for example,if coinbase create all their address with signature like this "1coinbase23FGHBGR456hH44jjbkdL" that will be cool,but i never find wallet like that.

You surely won't fine because it would become extremely high priced. Those addresses have to be mined. The longer, so the more sure someone can be that it really belongs to coinbase, the more expensive.

Though I can imagine that coinbase implements a single address per user that he should use to post in forums or so. That way they could advertise for free. I wonder if it would be worth it.

Though if someone wants then he can use an online tool to find out which addresses belong to the same wallet. If you know one of these addresses belongs to coinbase then you know the rest has to be too.

and not to mention time consuming.
a bitcoin vanity address starting with 1coinbase (8 char) takes hour to complete. even if it takes ten minutes it is long. because most of the users that use a service like coinbase they are not exactly experts (if they were they would have used a more secure wallet instead) and they would want to have an address right away.
the service is going to suck for them if they have to wait for a long time just to receive an address.

p.s. can walletexplorer.com find out if an address belongs to coinbase or not? it is doing it for other services, but i haven't tried it for coinbase and it is not in their list

As long as they use a shared wallet it should be possible. I'm not sure if coinbase does actually.

With a shared wallet you have a deposit address but when you send coins they will come from addresses that are unknown to you. And because different addresses are merged in these transactions it can be assumed that all addresses and the connections from those addresses belong to one wallet.

You can find many Bitcoin wallets and that is very good. We all hope that people are using it more in the future and that will be nice.
The wallets are also very safe and that is very good. But the most important is that the value of Bitcoin must rise.

bitcoin-hunter


You really didn't bother to read the first post in the thread, right? Sounds like you only have read the topic and wrote something in here fast.

Mostly its not possible to find out who's bitcoin address and it is good that this is not possible because that will also ruin peoples life.
Some people registered it but that us just their own choice.

I doubt that is possible imo, They can link between your wallets if you do concurrent transactions involving both of them but I don't think they can know what wallet they belong to at least directly.

Nonsense. Please stop posting if you don't know what you're talking about. This would not ruin anyone's life at all. The only way that this could really affect you negatively is if you did illegal things.

Please read the whole thread.

Some people tend to only read the first one and there are some that don't even do that. It does become pretty obvious if there was some discussion in the thread though.

i doubt that as you can use an address on any wallet you want as long as you have the private key of that address

no one will know on what website or program the wallet address is used but they can know that its your address if you will post it often

Right... the funny thing is, the moment I opened the next thread after I posted here, I found another post of that user. And guess what how his post sounded. :D

I placed a warning to him but judging form his posting habit I'm sure it won't be read. :D

I don't think it is possible to recognize the user wallet just from the address, Mostly the only way is recognizing a computer wallet from an online wallet by the fact that addresses are linked in PC wallets while they are not in online browser wallets.

You can not i think, there is no direct linking and details about wallet in transaction details but the IP can provide some info....

Bullshit. Both types of wallets can prevent spend links.


TX have no obvious IPs.

Is there a nest somewhere?

Nope there is no way to recognize a wallet just from a transaction... if you are afraid of being targeted somehow then that is not a serious risk since both of these wallets have encrypted usernames. a PC wallet is better imo

Then I tell you how it's possible.

You have a wallet on your pc, normal standard wallet. You receive a payment for a legal service on one address, another payment for a loan to another address. Then a payment you receive a payment from an illegal drug selling website. After that you send out a payment, doesn't matter to which address. The payment is that high that it needs bitcoins from all three addresses. Well, you might have posted the address to receive the coins to the legal service, maybe your real name is even connected to it. Though because you sent the transaction, everyone now knows that you received payments for the loan and from the illegal drug selling website. Now it's proven that you either use drugs or sell drugs. You can be tracked down because of the other addresses.

It's even worse when using change addresses because you lose the oversight about the addresses you use. You might be fully visible then.

isn't OP is asking about people recognizing that he is using what wallet "for example blockchain.info" and not about addresses being linked exactly.

Both. He fears being recognized personally and that his wallet is found.

With the above scenario the wallet type would be only found when it is an online wallet with shared wallet. If they can find out the wallet they could ask the persons behind to give them the user details. Though that is not even needed when making errors with receiving and sending bitcoins.

all wallets use shared addresses to cover for a single transaction both PC based and online ones

yes! there's so many ways here for you to get a wallet bitcoin address,
blockchain, bittex, poloniex, cex.io, yobit.net and coins.ph... :)

You mean or are you asking if it is possible to trace or identify the person who are using the bitcoin address , well if that was indeed ill answer you , it is impossible to identify which person is using the address that you want to trace because we are all anonymous to other person please let me know if i answered you in the way that is not related to your question . And i apologize in advance .

All i know we can find a Bitcoin wallet in any legit exchange....

It is not that hard to find a wallet and that is because you have to know which wallet is nice to use and which one is the safest so that is important.
And the most popular wallet is I think the Blockchain.

It's actually possible to know the identity of a certain bitcoin address owner but that would require high skills of stalking and hacking, assuming that there's no information given at all.

Please can you explain why this is the case.

A lot of reasons.Below are a few which I could think of right now.
-Your coins are not stored in your actual wallet but a 3rd party wallet ,the chances of they having your private keys are 0-100.

-Since it only requires a password to hack into a web wallet,attacks of simple keyloggers or remote attacks by team viewer are more.

-Phishing Links.Another reason why you should avoid web wallets.Look around for Blockchain.info phishing links.

-No Custom access available.You cannot set your custom fees,you can't customize your transactions as you can probably do with Core/Electrum.

No, unless that wallet marks their transaction.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

yes you 've just try this BTC wallet, coins.ph, for me he is safe to use, because there is the support of friendly support you can trade chat with them, but just my opinion only, that you just that I want to try

There is no way we can find it out unless if you have publicly made it known that you are using a certain wallet provider with that bitcoin address.😀

There are allot of bitcoin wallets on the martket you just need to search for the right one because ther are allot of wallets that can scam you like fake wallets i dont think you want to use one of these.

Well, there are definitely several bitcoin wallets aailable to you right now. I suggest you use Blockchain.info if you are a newbie just starting out with a newbie, or perhaps even coinbase.

With coinbase, you don't control your own keys. But with blockchain.info you can.

This is a great wallet^ but i personally can recommend some place like circle.com, but that website is for debit card buying and selling BTC if you have a checking account which works out very well and I highly suggest you check it out

Good wallets are hard to find but Blockchain i think is the best.

I agree with the last statement but with my web wallet I tend only to keep amounts below $100 & then just purchase more if I need to do a trade,
so I think in this case the risk is low especially with the longer established reputable webwallets. Also my webwallet has 2FA.

I think it's up to you to choose the type of wallet you want. no one is going to make yourself. you can use online or desktop wallet wallet it depends on you dude

I dont think he's asking if you prefer a wallet or not he's just asking if you use a good wallet and what wallet you use so, you have to look at it in different perspectives and such. The wallet is just a place to keep your money.

Probably but preference in a wallet to me is not a big deal when it comes to just using the basics like blockchain.info because they're like the number 1 used wallet for the entire bitcoin community i dont see the point in using another wallet

Hope this info helps you guys out.

Yeah i think you have got the gist of it. As Bitcoin runs on a decentralised system it is in a publically stored Ledger (namely the Blockchain). Through this all transactions are traceable. Therefore in a sense it is possible to find certain Bitcoin wallets.  :) :) :)

We cannot find out from whom a bitcoin address belongs to. We do not have that technology yet. But there is one site that will allow you to determine who sent you the bitcoins. It is coins.ph, if both of you are usig the same wallet in that site you will see who is the person that sents you your bitcoins or from what email addrss it came from, hope this helps.

They are not all traceable i'd say mainly due to the fact that everyday they delete older transactions into the void and you will never see those transactions again, but if you still think that it's traceable you go ahead man.

Blockchain doesn't care if you send to one address then another then another... they dont have to keep track.

True blockchain doesnt HAVE to keep track but really you never know when they can pull up some file that they said has been "archived" when most of the files are actually just saved in a further database... You must be careful with what you do

little bitc hard to indentify wallet from bitcoin address,i only know some wallet use number 3 on first letter on bitcoin address,like spectrocoin wallet and bitmixer,but mainstream wallet use 1 on first letter of bitcoin addresses.

The online Bitcoin wallets use different addresses, and most have a different address for each connection.
I know that the wallet Xapo uses special addresses because sometimes when I go on a faucet and I put an address of Xapo, they tell me that it is not a Bitcoin address.
But I do not know if it is possible to identify the addresses of each online wallet.

yes! I agree to your opinion. whatever gadgets you will use will actually ip address you used. IP address is not a publicity visibillity .☺😇

yes I agree with you. I also used to coins.ph because it is easy to use compare to the other bitcoin wallet.😃

I personally have never used coins.ph but i do use Circle.com a shitload because they do instant bank transactions (unless it's selling) I really want to see about making money with circle as in doing trades constantly, circle allows me to use $500 weekly and i think that i could make around $600 if i do everything correctly.

USE circle.com!!! you wont regret it bro.

I recommend circle also because that's how i do my personal transactions with btc and since they're a bigger business they have no way to scam you under legal terms, it's easy quick and honest. I know this sounds like an advertisement for them but it really isn't they're just a good wallet because you can also send money to friend if they need it or if you're just wanting to be nice.

Yeah, definitely. Circle is one of the best fiat to BTC converters and also a great personal wallet I guess. But if you want you could also try Coinbase.com, they are a good service as well.

They charge you no fees on transactions either, which is always an added bonus.

I am seeing extremely stupid answers by people here. They are just saying what they want to say and not answering to what OP has asked.
He said whether it is possible to find which wallet that address belongs to, then I think it is not possible.
For example, if you are using an exchange address, then it might be known because of its transactions, except you won't be able to know which wallet this address is associated with.

Off course you can find bitcoin wallets on the whole internet there are allot of bitcoin wallets you can use for hollding your coins. So if you want to use a bitcoin wallet you only need to look
at the best recommended wallet online.

I think any wallets are good... Because they hide our email and our info... And have really long wallet id. So I think all wallets are safe but its upon you to be carefull about phishing !

If you have registered your wallet address on.some exchanger then you could bew identified. Otherwise this would be very hard or impossible.

I guess you're not reading even a single word from OP's question,OP questioning whether wallet can be identified from an addres NOT how to create a wallet,try to read before replying my buddy

Many people like to rush through reading the thread and post their stupid answers. They need sig campaign money.

On topic, if all you have is a user's Bitcoin address, you won't be able to find out what wallet the address belongs to. It isn't recommended using online wallets (though some of them have nice features) because online wallets are easy to hack. it's best in my opinion to use a desktop based wallet and find someone on locaslbitcoin.com (or the currency exchange subsection) to buy Bitcoin with cash and vice versa.

If you for example use blockchain info service, and create a new wallet for each new address, and use the .onion tor hidden service, then it's really hard that they ever find out who you are. Then if you mix the coins it's pretty much impossible.

I think that hackers who trying to stole your bitcoins working with databases, they trying to hack everything at once but if you suspecting that your wallet can be hacked better to create one more.

The chances of someone finding your wallet is not impossible, but it's entirely not probably either.
Just imagine how many addresses there are right now, and how many are being created every second with all those new users and all those bots creating those addresses.

That depends on your skill set. The novice user won't be able to do that no, but a more seasoned person with enough background and knowledge, would be possible yes.

If you are using btc for anonymity reasons, then you will fall short. Everything can be traced ( to a degree ) from origin to destination and can also be linked to who uses it.

exchange is a third party. there are some exchanges that require identity verification as well,
maybe now there are a lot of exchanges site that have your true identity

You can link ID to identify it,but if  you want to be secure and remain anonymous-you can really hide it all
remember that bitcoin is actually the most safest way to keep your cash somewhere,maybe except banks.

For me it would be very difficult to know which particular wallet belongs to because of the complex way it is designed. Each wallet address is unique and long for you to be able to distinguish right then and there to whom it belongs to. Oh well, unless you asked for it personally. :)

It is not easy to find out the person which got the extact btc wallet address,I think only really skillfull
person can do this,mostly because every wallet is a long code,where every letter is special.
I would not care about it anyway,the probability is just too small.

Your question is if you can find bitcoin wallet, the answer is yes. You just need to be skilled at bitcoins things. I've also seen a pattern with blockchain where there is a 1 as the first character in the wallet address(if that helps). Try googling if you don't find your answer :)

I dotn thing if there is someone that can trace it but honestly its very hard to trace it who is the owner of the address.
And i think some people are still using bitmixer to period traces.. so very hard to know who is the owner of the address.. unless if he already stake the address here..

Unless the bitcoin owner uses a wallet software like block-chain that makes a new address for every new bitcoin transaction you make. So instead of many transactions under one address you have many different addresses with one transaction.

my opinion is that not many people in the world may do this,unless you will hand
them some kind of a tip to do it,because it is really hard to do without any info.

finding a bitcoin wallet, actually it is not easy to do that. unless you memorize those letter in your wallet address into bitcoin.
But you can find a different  bitcoin addresses in the exchanges except whose owning that address due to the people behind in each address is unknown.. :-\

Probably not possible because we don't know which address belongs to which wallet and may be if we know the algorithm of how the wallet address is made then we could know which address belongs to which wallet. But i think all wallet usage common algo to make the wallet address.

Off course can you find a bitcoin wallet that is not the hardest thing yo find because there are hundred of them online but be careful be sure you pick the right one because there are allot of wallets who are just there to scamm you.

i think it is just like an new updated version of blockchain.info because in the blockchain we receives bitcoin at a temporary address . then adresa became lost . here the condition is also same when we send btc from zebpay it usually unidentified address . so i think due to privacy we can't identify from a address that which wallet is.

sure...same here...i truly agree with you...publicly post of your address or anywhere, means no privacy and its not good..no safety..

Do you even care to read op before posting let alone other replies?The question is if it is possible to find which wallet a particular bitcoin address belongs to and not how to find online wallet.Please read before you post ;D