Bitcoin Forum

I rarely enter my wallet, what i do is check the balance on blockchain explorer to see if the btc is still there. This morning when i checked my  btc address, i saw that my balance of 0.3 btc had reduced to 0.0006 btc. When i saw that i had small heart attack and quickly entered my Electrum wallet. Thankfully my money was still there but had been transferred to a new address. I'm certain i have never done any transfers on that wallet. How did it happen? Is that a glitch or should i be worried?

Thank you

If you/anyone else never did a transaction from that wallet, it's unlikely that such event would occur. I guess you have certainly sent BTC someone. Check your transaction history or check through explorer. If you didn't execute the transaction, I guess you must change the wallet to a new one.

The OP said the balance is still in his electrum wallet so I am assuming electrum created the new address and moved his funds to the address belonging to his own electrum wallet.

OP, are you sure you did not do a transaction when the balance was 0.3? As such transfers to new addresses only happen when a transaction is made by you while you don't lose any money but just new addresses are created in your own wallet holding your overall balance. It happened to me while using Ledger Nano.

Check this FAQ: https://bitcoinelectrum.com/frequently-asked-questions/#why-did-my-wallet-send-money-to-an-unknown-address-without-my-permission

Did you make a transaction lately, a transaction which spent some of your coins leaving a "change" of 0.3BTC?
Because by default such change returns into your wallet, but a different address in the wallet (a change address).
This is for privacy reasons, but it can also be disabled. (It's better to leave as it is, though.)

Thanks for the replies guys. I checked and looks like i did have a small transaction which i totally forgot about. I guess when i saw that my money had gone i had some sort of temporary memory loss. Sorry for wasting you guys time.  :-[

On another note, I had a similar type of panic when I saw my coins not in explorer but found them in the wallet in another change address. However your second post here seems that you did remember the transaction that you had done.

Are you sure it was a "temporary memory loss"? Or are you trying to feign something because you are conscious about being called a fool? There is nothing to be shy about sending money to wrong address, happens with even the best of the best.

Still I think the first post that you made seems that Electrum had sent the money to a change address. These are nothing to make you worry and you can turn off this feature as well in you wallet UI. Those coins in change are still yours if they are there.

Consider the amount of each input you have as individual paper bills of fiat currency. So if you have 0.3 BTC in one input and on one address it's similar like you owned a 0.3 BTC paper bill. If you were to send 0.1 BTC to someone, you would have to pay with your 0.3 BTC bill, since that is all you have. You don't have any other bills or smaller coins. The entire 0.3 BTC balance will be spent, 0.1 BTC will be moved to the sender and the rest (change) will go to a new address that is part of your wallet. You now have a new 'bill' of approximately 0.2 BTC (- the transaction fees).   

Is there a way to switch off this feature in Ledger Nano S? It has now created 5 addresses in my wallet and there is no option to choose a specific sending address as it chooses that on its own. Some addresses contain less than 0.01 btc which may increase the required network fee.

If you choose to use Ledger Nano S with Electrum, then
1. In Electrum Preferences you can switch off the use of change addresses. I don't recommend it since the change addresses help your privacy. Also the returned change is still an extra input, so it doesn't help with the fee unless you consolidate them (send to yourself).
2. In Electrum, in the addresses tab (you may need View/Show Addresses) you can sort the addresses by balance, select as many as you want, right click and "Spend from".

Now here is a point of discussion. When coins are being sent from one person to a specific address, there is no "sending address" unless the coins are stored in a single address completely. Since many users of this forum have received payments from different sources like some signature campaign, some giveaway, exchanges, work payments, all those are combined to pay the sum that the user asks to send. Correct me if I am wrong here.

As for turning off the use of change addresses go to Tools>Preferences>Transactions and check/uncheck the boxes in that page. If you apply these for your Ledger's wallet it should work, though I dont have specific results for hardware wallets in case they vary.

You should read this post about what is change address (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5190841.msg52684373#msg52684373), I don't know if you noticed or not, your remaining balance should reflect on change address. Once you will click address tab then all address belongs you will visible there. You will see some label their like "Receiving" & "Change". However, its normal behaviour and nothing for hart attack. Just last day have seen similar questions, his/her case was also same. So you should learn what is change address and how its work. It will happen when you don't want to spent full unspent amount from a transaction. All custodial wallet manage it themselves via hot wallet that's why most of people don't know about it who are using them. But non-custodial have change address to do that, and that's why sometimes new user become surprise.

There is no such option in Ledger Nano. I checked all options in Settings for that means it will go on for each transaction and I will need to login to my account to know my real balance. Will need to use Electrum to send from a specific address and avoiding this change address feature.

Pretty much all wallets exhibit this behaviour by default nowadays... it's to avoid "address re-use" (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse)


Note that having your coins spread across multiple addresses does NOT affect the fees you are going to pay if you want to spend. It is mostly effected by the total number of UTXOs. If you send multiple individual transactions to one address, the inputs are not "combined", they are still regarded as separate UTXOs.

So, 100 inputs spread across 100 addresses will generate the same sized transaction (and require same fee) as 100 inputs in 1 address... as they're still 100 inputs! The only way to combine them all into 1, is to send ALL your money to yourself in a single transaction to consolidate them all into 1 single UTXO... which actually only really saves you money if the network goes crazy, the mempool floods and fees spike to like 100 sats/byte+ again.

You can read about consolidation here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2848987.0


So, you're just wanting to be able to monitor a single address and continually re-use it? ??? Why? It's bad for your privacy and the privacy of people you transact with (read the address re-use link above).

In any case, using Electrum to monitor a single address is no different to opening Ledger Live and viewing your balance... does it really matter if your X BTC is spread across 5 different addresses? ???

Not only to monitor a single address but sometimes for verification purposes you need to prove that a particular address belongs to you so that's what I needed. But thanks for telling that the fee is not affected by having balance on different addresses so that would not be a problem now.