Bitcoin Forum

If I transfer BTC to a friend/family, they now know my wallet address, correct? Does this mean they can see all the transactions I have done from that wallet? It seems like wallet information is public except for identity, but that would be forfeited once I make a transfer, right?

Yes, they can see the address(es) which sent them bitcoin.

It depends. They can certainly see all the transactions you have made from that addresses, but not necessarily that wallet.

Most wallets are a collection of addresses. These addresses are not intrinsically linked to each other, and simply knowing one address in a wallet does not let someone deduce which other addresses belong to that wallet. If you use two or more addresses together in the same transaction, though, then that's a pretty strong indication that they are part of the same wallet.

For example. Let's say you send some coins from Address A and Address B to me in a single transaction. Most people seeing that transaction would rightly assume that Address A and Address B belonged to the same person. Next week, you send some other coins from Address A to a family member. That family member can see that Address A belongs to you, so can look back and see the other transactions which Address A has made, and be able to deduce that Address B also belongs to you. If next week you send some coins from a new address, Address C, to someone else, then your family member won't know about that address or transaction, unless you later link it back to either Address A or Address B.

The other possibility is that you make a transaction from Address D, and receive some coins back as change to Address E. If you later send those coins from Address E to your family member, then they might be able to work out that they were change from Address D, and link Address D back to you as well.

The simple answer is if you don't want anyone knowing about your other transactions, then never reuse addresses and be careful about spending change.

If you use your own stand alone wallet, then indeed, it doesn't matter where you send funds to, the recipient will know the sender address. And all the transactions related to any address are publicly visible on any block explorer. But if you were careful, used separate addresses for various needs, didn't mix them, used different change address for all transactions and so on then the recipient will see only a tiny part of "the story".
So it depends a lot how you've used the wallet.

If you use an online wallet, it basically depends on how it's done. The custodian wallets are basically accounts on a platform and you don't really know where the funds are sent from when you make a transaction (may be or may not be that much related to you).

If you want to be on the safe side, you can indeed consider all info as visible.
Bitcoin is not anonymous.


The usual solutions for this are:
* use of mixers (if you do please make sure it's a reputed one and you've read the FAQ page first)
* try to lose track by exchanging the coins into something else and back (but fees and possibly KYC apply)
* send Monero or such, i.e. coins designed for anonymity (which I don't really think that's what you want in this case)

What do you mean by forfeited?
If that's your balance then yes, exactly it moved after it was sent. Whereas the transaction details history will never be forfeited from the blockchain, it is immutable.

[/quote]

I think if you just want to hide your balance from a family member who isn't a tech guy, you can just transfer a small amount to another address and then make a second transaction to the family member.

This first transaction will most likely "hide" your total balance, and people wnt be looking past transactions unless they really want to track you.
Ofc that is not the best way to have privacy, and the best is to use a bitcoin mixer. 

But I think it depends  on how much privacy you really want to achieve.

^ BTC transaction was designed for having transparency and this is not all anonymity, it is pseudonymous. Once your identity is linked to that address your identity will be exposed and you can hide all your transactions not unless you will use third-party tools that can mix your coin before sending it to the destination that wants to hide, like suggested above it was a BTC mixer. All information in your wallet will be exposed too once they know what wallet address you have used. But I don't understand what is forfeited, no one can get it if that is your coin, remember always store your BTC in a wallet where you own the private key.

It all depending on the structure of your wallet.

Imagine you have 1 address 1xxx that received 1 BTC one time. You have no choice but to use it and anyone receiving coins from you could assume that you had 1 BTC.

Now imagine that you received 0.25 BTC to the same 1xxx address 4 times. Sending someone 0.1 BTC would require only one of those outputs, but it would still reveal the rest of the outputs of the same address, and it will be practically like the first case.

Now imagine you received 0.25 BTC four times, but into a unique address every time. Now if you send your friend 0.1 BTC, they will only know that you owned 0.25 BTC and not know about the three other 0.25 BTC  coins. However, your friend will know about your 0.15 BTC change, and if you will later use it together with the other 0.25 BTC coins (for example to send someone 0.35 BTC), they will learn about them.

To have good privacy you need to use mixing services and manually select coins (UTXO - unspent transaction output) when you make a transaction.

If it is an exchange wallet, it will be difficult to track your transaction on that wallet. Based on my experience, the deposit transaction from another wallet to our wallet in an exchange cannot be checked. This can be safe for you if you don't want your friends or your family to know your wallet balance. But if you use Metamask or MEW wallet, your transaction can be tracked.

That is not a "wallet", it is an "account". Not to mention that you don't even own bitcoin when you store it with a third party, be it an exchange or a custodial wallet like Coibase. You just have a "promise" that the company that holds your bitcoins would give it to you whenever you asked, while they can refuse to for any arbitrary reason.
But you are right, since custodial "accounts" use their own "mixed" coins to fulfill the promise of converting the IOUs to bitcoin, it is not possible to see the user's balance.

In short, only if you stored all your bitcoin in the one address.

If you distribute them to different bitcoin addresses, then only some of your balance will be discovered (some online wallets/platforms give you only one address as explained in the replies above).

• Protect your privacy (https://bitcoin.org/en/protect-your-privacy)
• Privacy-o-meter (https://blockchair.com/api/docs#link_M6)
• Change address (https://support.blockchain.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018566291-Change-addresses)
• Address reuse (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Address_reuse)
• Enhanced privacy with Wasabi / Samourai wallet (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5184238.0)

Practically, to protect your privacy, you should avoid to reuse address. You should use change address and Coin Join transaction. With Wasabi wallet, you have both Coin Join transaction and Tor.

You wouldn't be so alarmed if you just didn't do any transactions to a porn site.  ;D  Yes they may see all the transactions but you can always reason. 
Seriously I also worry but it looks like they are yet not interested in such things as checking out how much BTC I have in my wallet or what transactions I do with the wallet I have.

Spreading out your BTC to a different wallet or just send altcoins to them. I do trade which is why I just send from an exchange wallet whether BTC or altcoin. If they check that wallet out, they'd really assume I'm the richest.

The problem of course with this is the custodial platform can see every coin you own and every transaction you make using their platform. You might be able to hide all your other transactions from a cursory look by your family member as in OP's example, but you have zero privacy overall.

I really wouldn't recommend this. If you are looking to hide your balance from a close family member, then likelihood is OP has a good reason for wanting to do so. A single intermediate address is trivial to see past for even a complete newbie with 10 minutes of time to read about how transactions work.

Maybe they are not yet, but what about in the future. Everything you do with bitcoin is an immutable record. If you compromise your privacy now, then you will find it very difficult if not impossible to reclaim it in the future.

It didn't came to my mind the same concern as OP's concern because if we were going to talk about exchange wallet if someone or some of my relatives wanted to track down my crypto asset they would only going to see an specific amount and specific transaction I have don e but if I have disseminate my asset into different asset they woul not going to track it down. So far this I haven't take this as a primary concern because none of my relatives are being curious about tracking it down.

Of course as the blockchain itself of BTC is a distributed public ledger that is tamper-proof that can be seen by anyone, especially your close family members and friends once you have sent them some BTC or any other cryptocurrency. They can check the history of your transactions from the very beginning. That’s what crypto transactions are.

Unless you don’t want them to see your main wallet, you can simply create another Bitcoin wallet and deposit some BTC. But make sure the sender is not from your main wallet, but from an exchange. Or much better if you knew someone who do P2P transactions.

Indeed, I was focused on OP problem and I didn't mention this important detail. Thanks for doing so.



I did think on this "method", but I decided to not tell it because if somebody learns to look onto block explorer, it may get (rather fast) to understand such an easy move and get to follow OP funds (of course, depending on how good OP uses different addresses for different purposes - but I expect the worse in this, privacy wise).

and why do you want to hide how many bitcoins you have? you don't trust the person you are sending bitcoins? if you don't trust it then use some mixer that will have more anonymity. although I would advise you not to be hard on people in your family unless they are criminals or liars or dangerous people

OP has to follow above directions because that's what's best for him ,actually the wallet market is also good ,but maybe later there other questions from your family and might think that "ownership of address exchange wallet is your wallet"
may it could be that OP wants to hide his assets because "sorry" family usually borrows money or something else ;D social jealousy in the family !

of course they will know the amount of assets you have and also your transactions because the bitcoin blockchain is an open book, very transparent.

i also think the same as you, why does op ask like that or does he/she have other intentions or goals "lol". 

Because it is transparent, of course they will be able to see the balance and all transactions at that address. If you want to be anonymous, you can use methods such as using some mixers or sending them through an exchange.

If you send Bitcoin directly form your wallet then receiver will be able to know exact amount of coins you have on your address or addresses.
Good address management can reduce this, and you can also use coinjoin or mixers like ChipMixer to remove connection with your original address.
Sending coins form your exchange account is also an option, but much more risky because they can lock your account and freeze your coins at any time and for any reason.

That depends. Are you making use of one address for all your transactions? If you have been making use of just one address for all the transaction you have been doing, then they will be able to see all the transactions that you have done so far: which includes all the money that you have received and also the ones you have sent. So, that’s for sure that they would see your transactions, And possibly know the balance that you have on that address.  Now if you have noticed, what I was saying here is address, and not wallet: I am using the word address because your address doesn’t necessarily mean that what is stored there is what is  originally stored in your wallet.

This can be because when you are making use of a wallet that has different addresses, then nobody would know the actual amount that is in your wallet. So, I would suggest you to make use of a wallet that would change your address anytime you’re about to make a transaction. That way you wouldn’t have to be repeating the same address all the time.

Off course yes, if you send any fund from your wallet to other person wallet then he can see your all transaction and balance of your wallet. For this reason when need to send any assets from my wallet to my friend wallet, then i create a temporary wallet then sent my fund from my wallet to my friend wallet.               

One of the ways this issue can be solved is probably by sending via a Private Address that doesn't reveal the contents of the wallet to recipient of fund.  The private address could only be known to recipients also. Guess this can be implemented on Bitcoin without a hardfork

yes, the bitcoin recipient can check your transactions and they can also see the balance in your wallet.
If you don't want other people to see your balance then use another wallet as a backup wallet so that the balance in your main wallet is not seen by other people or your family.

No you're wrong, the receiver won't be able to see the balance of his wallet, he will only be able to see the amount of BTC he had on the sending address at the time of the transaction and the amount he is currently holding on the change address of the transaction if he didn't send them elsewhere since this transaction.

The issue here in you particular context of your case, bitcoin ceases to be anonymous when someone knows that it is you. It is very obvious, but that does not mean that the transactions are anonymous for third parties.

Bitcoin is a great public ledger, where all transactions can be reviewed. So, although it is true that all transactions are there, each address is associated with individuals, companies and exchanges, depending on where you manage your addresses, your family members could eventually know your balance.

Now, in this particular case you are interested in the right to keep your information private, there can be several simple ways but in some cases you have to give information to third parties and you would also lose your anonymity with them but you would give zero information of what your funds are to those who know you or know that that address belongs to you.

If you transfer anything with anyone else your wallet address will show to the reciver and then he can scan your address on scan websites and recievr can know your balance easily.

Avoiding address reuse is necessary for your privacy, but it is not sufficient. Equally important is paying attention to change and choosing which inputs you use in a transaction. There is no point using coins from 5 different addresses for 5 different transactions, if you later make a consolidation transaction which includes all of the change outputs from those 5 transactions, since that can easily be detected and will therefore link the 5 original addresses together.

Using a single intermediary address between your main wallet and your friend's wallet does almost nothing to protect your privacy. If you want to move coins from one place to another while obscuring the history, then you should do so via a mixer. Further, using a "temporary wallet" is a terrible idea. What if your friend decides to send some coins back to your address, only for you to find you no longer have access to that address because it was part of your "temporary wallet" which you have since deleted?

Yes, if you send it directly from your wallet it is traceable. That is what differentiate financial transactions done using blockchain technology and traditional banking system.

your family or relatives can easily find out your assets if you use the main wallet as the sender. If you want to avoid publicizing your assets, you can send them using a third-party exchange, because the exchange's wallet will not show your assets personally because there are a lot of assets collected there. it is slightly better to avoid tracking on your personal wallet.

Mixer may be more effective, and more concise. I have never used a Mixer but it looks like the mixer is able to scramble your transaction address, if a see on several articel about mixer. So he doesn't need to create a new address, save the prifat key and seed. It may be a risk like you said, but I think I have several alternative wallets to store assets. Another problem is the cost, there will be additional costs if you have assets on the main wallet and sent on the second wallet that is used to send to your brother. Sometimes if busy network also needs more cost.

Yes, as per the indications above there are options with mixers to mix up your address and in a way make it indistinguishable. That's a bonus working with Bitcoin also.

In a normal transaction once they receive the transfer they'll obviously see your address and if they wanted to they can check it on the explorer to see everything you've done with that address what went out. what came in, current balance. That's the beauty of blockchain transparency

Bitcoin blockchain is publicly available so anyone have your address can enter into the blockchain explorers and find the history of the address, remaining balance and all and to the extreme it is also possible to find the wallet ID and find all other addresses belongs to that wallet if I am not wrong. So if you don't want anyone to know your address then you have to mix the coins before sending for that lot of ways are available or simply you can send funds from an exchange so that they will never know your personal address.

mixers are the best way to keep them from seeing the contents of your wallet. Actually there are several ways other than that, but the method is quite inconvenient, like having 2 wallets. the first wallet is for savings purposes, while the second wallet is for transactions. well, even though he could send assets from wallet 1 to 2, and still be tracked, he just had to prepare an excuse for that. This is the same as an exchange, only the difference lies in the fee. the fee on the exchange may be higher, but it is safer. while sending from wallet to wallet is still at risk of being caught, it's just that the fee is less. well, if you don't want to bother like that, mixers are the best way.

Even this way the receiver can easily track where the bitcoin comes from and he may be able to know all your transactions and think you are a wealthy person  ;)
The only way to hide your assets is to use a bitcoin mixer or if you are intelligent enough you can make use of exchange to act as a mixer for you.

By the way, if OP has lot of bitcoins, its advisable to divide and keep them in separate wallets.

Not only you, Everyone who have the transection id can know about your wallet balance. Because its easy to check anyone's wallet address through tx id.
Its better to use an exchange wallet to send someone with full privacy.Then they will not be able to trace your balance anymore.

As someone earlier mentioned in the public discuss that using exchange wallet to hide your identity from a family is like being penny wise but pounds foolish. Exchanges can provide your identity to any body or individual and they can even do worse with it.
If the OP is concerned about forfeiting his identity by that I guess he means exposing his account balance to his family members, he can simply operate from different bitcoin wallet. By that his bitcoin total balance will be his secret.

Yes I think they can see your balance if they scan your wallet. I think next time you wonna avoid this, it is better to send them crypto asset from an exchange wallet.

There is no such thing as a "Wallet ID" when it comes to the bitcoin protocol. Any centralized service which provides you with a "Wallet ID" is simply using it to process logins to their website or system. It is not recorded anywhere on the blockchain. Further, knowing a single address from one wallet does not allow you to calculate any of the other addresses within that wallet. You might be able to work out (with some assumptions) other connected addresses by looking at different addresses being used as inputs together in the same transaction, but if someone is careful not to link addresses in this way, then you might not be able to tell anything at all.

I would never recommend using an exchange as a surrogate mixer. Unlike a good mixer, all centralized exchanges track your IP address, your deposits and withdrawals, perform blockchain analysis to see where your coins come from and where they go, and link all that information together to sell or share with third parties. Using an exchange might prevent your family member from identifying your wallet, but it gives you much worse privacy overall, not to mention the additional risks you accept of having your coins frozen or seized.

Well, you should in theory have several different wallets for different purposes. So say that you have a hardware wallet for all of your Pornhub subscription payments (joke) ...then do not send any coins from that wallet to your friends and family. You can have an Electrum wallet for all the family and friends stuff... (with only a small amount of coins, if you want to fool them)

I push my coins through a popular Mixer services before I transfer it to one of my wallets.. so nobody can trace it back to my main hoard.  ;) Yea, you pay some fees for that, but it is totally worth it for your financial privacy.  ;D

They will know for sure unless if they don't have knowledge on how to trace the transactions. And if they got the interest about your wallet and wanted to know how much inside.

But if you were sending it indirectly like using mixing services, that gonna be impossible. Well, I suggest you use that if you wanted to keep your wallet anonymous from your friends/family members. However, it wasn't a problem if they know, you should be proud of it and likely they give thanks to you back then.

Yes they will know your wallet address since you are the sender but if the receiver doesn't know anything crypto related then he will not know your address :D.
Since there is a thing called "blockchain" which acts as an online ledger then they will see all of your transactions unless you will use mixers.
That is the reason why Bitcoin is pseudo-anonymous because they can still track the owner.

If you don't want to forfeit and want to make your identity to be private, just use another address to send money to them though they can still track you if they will try to track that address' transaction. Maybe just use mixers so that you can keep yourself private whenever you will send BTC to your family or friends.

Most people don't really give attention to the spend from one specific address and that is why the dust attacks are still happening to trace the wallet balance it can be only avoided by freezing the particular address if we are using the non custodial wallet. But still there is a possibility to trace if the inputs are coming from multiple addresses so we can assume that it belongs to same wallet, sorry if I am kind of messed with because whenever I am talking technically I get confused what I am really trying to say  ::)

I've had a question in my mind for a long time: Can someone somehow figure out the other BTC or ETH addresses of a ledger wallet?

Let me explain: Imagine someone gets 10 addresses from his ledger nano S, and he uses some of those addresses. Now, if someone else knows that address 1 belongs to that guy, can he somehow figure out the other 9 addresses belong to him? Does ledger themselves know? Can the government know about it? Can a hacker or a skilled programmer figure it out somehow?

And obviously I don't mean the simple case where they share transactions. They don't have any common Tx'.

Yes, when you are sending on a wallet like Bitcoin core. Electrum and other non custodial but if you do sent out on an exchange address then it cant really be traced up.

Dont know what you do mean about forfeited because balances cant really be touched nor be stolen from you as long you do hold your own private key of the said wallet.

They could know the wallet balance of yours but they do know that you are the ones been holding into?

Another way to do this would be to use a different passphrase but the same seed phrase for each different wallet. That way, you don't have to resort to hot wallets and can have all your coins protected by the security of your hardware wallet, while still keeping them in entirely separate wallets.

In order: No, maybe, yes, and yes.

If I know one of the addresses from your Ledger wallet, and you haven't linked that address with any other addresses in a common transaction, then there is no way to link that address to any of your other addresses only through blockchain evidence, block explorers, etc.

However, if you use Ledger Live, then you connect to Ledger's servers and you send their servers a list of all the addresses in your wallet to receive the transaction history and updated balance, so Ledger can easily see all the addresses in your wallet. You can avoid this if you don't use Ledger Live, but if you substitute it with Electrum, for example, then whoever is running the Electrum server(s) you connect to will now see all your addresses in the exact same way. If you want to avoid this altogether, then you need to run your own node/server and connect to that instead.

If you connect to a third party server as above, be that Ledger, Electrum, or someone else, then that data can absolutely be shared with the government or any other third party. Also, if someone has infected your computer with malware, then they could similarly link your addresses when you connect your wallet.

All the balances and transaction history are publicly available. Your identity, however, isn't. If the ones you sent your coins to knows you personally, they can associate the address from which the funds came from to you, and they can tell that to everyone else as well or keep it to themselves. If you trust the ones who you will send your money to, I think this should be a non issue anymore.

Sure bro, they can scan your wallet via explorer and see what you got. This was how my friend and I tracked down a scammer who assembled a failed bitcoin mining machine for us in 2017, he was suppose to refund our money, he complained of been bankrupt but we tracked his previous bitcoin wallet and he has done over 40 BTC transactions and was holding 23BTC, when we confronted him with this evidence, he went into hiding although we later go to know he was into heavy gambling.

sure, they can see your balance, your transaction, and all thing history from your wallet, because bitcoin running in blockchain, its mean we can see all the information about the wallet. but if you dont have the private key, you will never can access it. so if you dont want to makes your friend or family now about your balance, just use the exchanger to send to them