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Hi, I have an electrum wallet question.

With my usual way with electrum I have the cold wallet and the watch only wallet.
The watch only wallet I created with the xpub key.

Now I made a new electrum wallet and imported a priv key and now I went to wallet information but this time there is no xpub info?

How would I make a watch only wallet this time.
Is it because I imported just 1 priv key and 1 address.


Someone told me that in this case just use my address to create the watch only wallet?

If the watch only wallet uses an address not the xpub is there any possible issues?
I just want to know does a watch only wallet created by an address only work exactly as one created by using an xpub?

Thanks for information that explains this.

There should be no issues. It's the same thing. Multiple addresses are derived from your xPub so importing that would allow you to watch "all of your wallets transactions" at once but if you import one address only, you don't need that since you only have one address to watch to start with.

Thanks for explaining.

Someone mentioned that xpub created watch only wallets can create new addresses but if you make a watch only with a single address it can not.
I noticed a discussion where they said something about you could have an issue with " change"

But I wasnt sure what they meant and I think they never came back to explain further. .

Thanks.

There is no difference creating a watch on my wallet from either address or xpub if the person is actually thinking that with xpub which is a master public key will expose the wallet it is a no because only importing private key or seed phrase does that.

The difference is since all address belonging to that wallet will be derived using the master public key (xpub) it is better to track all addresses on that wallet but if you want to track a single wallet then you can simply just import that address as a watch only wallet and it tracks only that address.

What they mean concerning change addresses is if you spent from that address or wallet and there is a change then you can keep track of that change since you’re tracking just a single address but with xpub you will be able to track even the change addresses too.

The wallet which gave you a master public key (xpub) was a HD wallet and it contained a seed phrase and a master public key too.
In a HD wallet, you have a seed phrase which generates your master private key. Your master private key generates all your private keys and also your master public key.
Your addresses can be derived from your master public key or individual private keys.

In your new wallet, you imported a private key. That private key generated a single address and there is no master public key.

xPub is a master public key it contains all BTC addresses derived from a single seed.
If you just imported a single private key it only contains one address it won't generate a multiple BTC address.

Since you talking about the change you don't need to be worry about the change once you made a transaction from watch only wallet. The change amount will be sent to your address.

Thanks for the replies I understand better now.

My only concern is that if i make spend that makes some change.
How will i spend the change with this watch only address?

Or do I need to find the address the change went to and just spend that with a new watch only address linked to those addresses.
How to find those addresses.

I think in bitcoin code I never have seen any change from a spend.
All my funds just stayed on my single address.

Thank you for explaining.

Edit .bitmaxz explained that the change will go back to the same address.

If you create a wallet using single private key/address, your wallet would have only one address and that will be used as the change address.
This means that any remaining fund will be send back to the sending address.

By the way, you can't spend bitcoin from watch-only wallet at all.
In your watch-only wallet, you can create an unsigned transaction which should be singed in a wallet containing the private key associated with your address.

Thank you for explaining it really helped with my understanding.

Bitcointalk is the best place for gaining crypto knowledge.

Electrum takes care of that for you, and you don't have to worry about it. It knows to keep reusing the same address because the only data you imported was a single private key connected to only one address.

Years ago, I think it was possible to have issues spending from certain paper wallets that only had one private key. In those cases, if the user didn't spend the entire UTXO, they would receive change back into a different address whose private key they didn't have. The coins in the change address would then become inaccessible to them. That's not an issue with properly configured and updated software.

Thanks for explaining. Yes I am more relieved now I know it will simply keep returning to the same address.