Bitcoin Forum

Is there a ways to know which btc address is from?
Like I can see some btc address that starts with 1 and sometimes its from blockchain but I'm not really sure. how do i know its from any hard wallet such as multibit or bitcoincore.  some of them also starts with 1. they may be even from exchange sites.

I don't think there are any ways of identifying which wallet an address came from. Afaik, if your wallet supports exporting and importing address, then you can move your wallet from one to another. What I know is exchange wallets usually has those 3xxxx format.

No. Addresses with 1 that are pay-to-public-key hash and addresses starting with 3 are pay-to-script hash. There is no patterns for the addresses generated by different client.

You can probably identify those generated by shared wallets by going to walletexplorer.com which keeps tags the addresses by analysing the behavior of the address.

You can go to blocktrail.com it has an built in function
of tracking mentions of addresses throughout net. This forum for example etc.
It may give information from where ( country) address is.
With that function in mind, we have to watch out on informations given
on forums and sites.

If you know how the wallet, e.g. handles change or selects inputs you can make an educated guess. You can never be sure though. Well, unless its bc.i. They state on their HP if they relayed a TX first. That could also mean someone used their site to push a TX created elsewhere, but Id says thats uncommon.

You could also tell (2013) which were probably using an Android wallet due to an Android prng bug.  It also wasn't a guarantee, but at the time was highly likely. See:

https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-08-11-android

In general without a problem in the wallet, it should be impossible to tell where the address is generated from the address itself.  As shorena says, you can make educated guesses with other metrics.

so ill-gotten btcs that are sent to a btc address may be tracked but still possibilities of not getting it back is higher then.
I was thinking if somehow we can identify which company provide the btc address be contact and simply provide information if authorities demands for it. lets say FBI learned that the btc address used was from an exchange site and so FBI may request to this exchange site the information about the owner and such.

I try to Google the addresses hoping I find some info. Most of the time it's really hard to find valuable that leads you to the owner.

Wallet developers would not be able to provide any information and should not be able to. This would violate one of the purpose Bitcoin serves; to provide privacy.

In the example, it is easy to track exchange address. Most exchanges usually have a cold and hot wallet. The coins sent to the address would most likely be transferred to either of the addresses. The authority would be able to find out who owns that address in the case. This applies to shared wallets too.

Does it apply also to the mixers addresses? how about the hard drive wallets?
I was interested to follow some coins being moved from an address to another and it seem harder than i thought. A determined on would have to contact exchange sites which they wouldn't likely to respond.

There is nothing to infer about the sender by examining a normal bitcoin address - they are randomly generated, and the hashing algorithm used in creating the human-readable address further obscures any meaning.

Vanity addresses are one exception - while still randomly generated, we pick one we like after generating billions. An address that starts with 1dceleron might be mine.

If you wish to learn more about wallets and senders and receivers, you can however "follow the money", by seeing how an address was funded, and to where it spent its money. This can be done on block explorer sites, but you quickly see coins mixing with other coins from other senders rendering the exercise pointless. This is why it is good to only use addresses once, so there is even less for someone to learn about the sender.

I found this, i dunno how much it is reliable tho. But i found interesting things browsing on it  ::)
http://bitcoinwhoswho.com/