Bitcoin Forum

Today I would like to ask the community what and how the wallet systems work on block chain.info


So I  make a new wallet for any incoming transaction, does this help add anonymity to my wallets, or does it still come down to my wallet identifier. I am trying understand why people recommend to always use a new wallet for every incoming transaction.

Something doesnt make sense to me….

Well, creating multiple wallet, in my view, is to disperse funds and avoid putting all your eggs in one basket that is dangerous.

The longer you use that wallet, more dangerous the wallet will be, because the hacker might target your wallet or your passwords might get leak. So changing wallet is a good way to avoid this situations.

It probably helps to keep your identity more anonymous but that wouldn't be very logical anyways since anyone could look at the address you forwarded the payment to, if you forward your transactions every time to the same address, then obviously everyone would know that that address you're constantly sending funds to, is your main address.

People might recommend you using bitcoin mixers as well, but that's generally for illegal & criminal activities. I don't recommend it because if something goes wrong with that mixer site, you lose all your bitcoins. You also have to pay a very expensive fee to use their service.

Did I answer your concerns or do you still have questions about:

I have several wallets for the same purpose that I have several bank accounts in several different countries.

When you have several sources of income and several ways to spend it, you need organization. Also, in my physical wallet, the one I have in my pocket, I have 2 bills compartments, and that's nice. One for Euros, one for Swiss francs...

My reason is that I like to keep my coins save in several wallets. 8 cold wallets to be precise.

If you store all your coins in just 1 cold wallet and something happens with it, then you're going to feel sorry for not using multiple wallets.

And also, my cold wallets only contain received transactions.

I sometimes create new accounts for different things that I might get involved in. For example I have an address just for my gambling funds.

It can help anonymity but not if they all get spend linked as people can then see all the addresses that belong to you. This might not be a big deal but depends on how anonymous you want to be. Some people don't want others knowing all their addresses or balances so they use new addresses. It doesn't have anything to do with your wallet identifier. That is just essentially your log in name.

Well, you not restricted to using only one wallet, which is, in my opinion a good thing. {Use a new one for every new service you are testing}

Or you could use one and just break up the coins and send them to paper wallets as they come in.... {The amount left in you main account, will not be attractive for a hacker, if it only has 0.1 btc or less}

Most people use different wallets for anonymity {If you track back to the original wallet, you will eventually find the owner and all his spending patterns...}

I don't have any particular reason for it, but I just like to keep my funds distributed and don't like people to know what I am upto.
So in those cases its better to have multiple wallets than only one

I believe the only purpose to create multi wallet is to improve anonymous.
you can use different wallet for different purpose.

My reasons of confidentiality :)
where one does not know my main wallet, and I could break it with multiple addresses

yes true as stated above, to avoid from hackers. and another one to shy away from beggars(if they know my wallet filled with bitcoin)  :D

I also wanted to know the same thing.

I imagine from the OP's question this answer is a bit beyond what he is asking but in response to your reply as well as others here, I use Monero for privacy.  It is much better than mixers as it's anonymity is built into the protocol using proven crytographic principals.  Other privacy coins use mixers...for that you could just use btc. 

I can pay anyone who accepts btc with Monero/XMR using xmr.to

https://xmr.to/

It is a simple web wallet. What do you need to know?


You don't want to create a new account after each transaction.


Not much.


Nobody can link an address with wallet identifier.


People recommend you to create new address not new wallets. It will give you more privacy as you can store BTC on multiple addresses and people won't which addresses are yours unless you use UTXO of two addresses in same transaction.


What you thought isn't what it is and that's why it isn't making sense. :)

   -MZ

Why not? I purposely create different wallets to receive money coming from different sources and make it a point to change to a new one every now and then, just for anonymity reason. There are wallets on my phone, laptop, pc and I keep private keys for all of them so that I can load it interchangably to different platforms.

i have new wallets just in case and for different stuff..

I have different btc accounts for different stuff, so earning from faucets, bitcointalk, services, mining.. so i know when it's at

+ when there is a delay in confirmation i can't use the wallet so if i have more than one i can use the other ones...

Words have meaning.  Using the wrong words results in causing confusion and making communication more difficult.  Please learn and use the following properly.

"Bitcoin Address": A string of letters and numbers typically starting with a 1 or a 3 that is used when creating a transaction to control who will have access to the bitcoins.

"Bitcoin Wallet": Software or a service that allows a user to manage one or more bitcoin addresses along with the associated private keys, and typically provides an interface for creating transactions and identifying the total amount of bitcoins under the wallet's control.

"Bitcoin Account":  A service provided whereby you turn complete control of your bitcoins over to the service provider and trust that they will return those bitcoins to you upon your request in the future.  (Some service providers will misleadingly call this a "wallet".)

So, I create multiple "wallets" for the same reason that I don't carry my entire net worth of cash in my pocket everywhere that I go. Mainly, security and convenience.  I have some cash on deposit in a bank account, I have some cash in a safe, I have some cash in my pocket, I have some cash in assets, etc.  Similarly, I have some bitcoins in a "paper wallet", some bitcoins in Armory, some bitcoins in Coinbase, and some bitcoins in Blockchain.info.

I create a new bitcoins ADDRESS for increased privacy and slightly improved security.  If I only use one bitcoin address, and I give you that address so that you can send me a small amount of bitcoins, then you can look on the blockchain and see with absolute certainty exactly how many bitcoins I've received in the past, and on what date and time I received them.  If others that sent bitcoins to or received bitcoins from have made their bitcoin addresses public, then you can see when and who I've been sending my bitcoins to, and receiving them from and how many I sent or received in each transaction.  You'll also be able to continue to monitor all of this information about my personal finances in the future.

I create many wallets to be on a safer side but I mainly use only blockchain as the transactions are safer and it can complete one transaction in few seconds while coinbase as some restrictions and I don't know why but Xapo does not work for me. I don't trust it as much as I trust blockchain.

the only real reason it's if some of them are corrupted, not really any other reason since with one wallet you can already split your income on multiple address

...

CtrlAltBernanke420

I changed my BTC receiving and spending patterns when some serious members here at bitcointalk told me similar things as the above: more privacy!  The logic behind what they say is good.  You not only protect yourself, but to a lesser degree protect your partners receiving your BTC and those you send to.

I currently use three wallets: a Trezor one, a Ledger Nano one and a blockchain.info wallet.  The first two are mostly for longer term storage or big purchases (gold).  I am trying to see which I like better (Trezor vs. Ledger), so far I like them both.  I do use the blockchain.info wallet to mix coins with their SharedCoin service and smaller transactions.  The blockchain.info wallet is pretty easy to use with nice features, but is NOT as secure!

Like many others here, I have used a lot of addresses, maybe 60 or more.


DannyHamilton

THANK YOU for your explanation, I did know the difference between "wallets" and addresses", but you cleared up a point or two and performed a genuine public service.  Bravo.

For further clarificationYou should create a new one of these every time you receive bitcoin. There are a few exceptions to this rule, primarily when you are expecting to receive bitcoin from some kind of service multiple times and they offer an option to "lock" your payout address as an additional security measure. When you send bitcoin from that 'dedicated' address, it is best to always send to a previously unused address
Generally speaking most wallet services allow for some level of coin control, however it is generally best to create multiple wallets to promote additional privacy. Even though wallet services allow for coin control, people make mistakes, and you may inadvertently sign one transaction with two private keys that you intended to keep disassociated with each-other, having multiple wallets helps prevent you from making that mistake  
I may be incorrect on this, however I believe that some people (including satoshi) at one point called a bitcoin address a 'bitcoin account'. Additionally, today, some services allow the user to retain control of the private keys when creating an 'account' (for example coinbase multisignature vault - the private keys are generated either in the browser or by coinbase - I am not sure which and do not have the resources to tell you which applies - although you will need to trust coinbase enough to believe they will not retain a copy of the private keys after they give them to you). For the above reasons I would dispute this definition.

Besides what I've already said, if you want to be safe the way I want, it's best to have several wallets, with different software, and to buy your BTC from several exchanges in different countries, wiring money to those from several bank accounts in several different countries.

I also suggest you move several times each year.

Hey Danny, great add here. I also want to thank you for finding a solution to your personal frustration with signature ad campaign posters. Everyone, see DannyHamilton's signature, he's made a list of those of us that have an signature ad and ignored us so he doesn't see our posts. That's a great way to deal with it! Another great way to deal with it (if you're sick of seeing ads) is to elect to not see signatures of posts, which you can select in your account profile settings (look and layout).

We CAN coexist and remain productive to the community.

Well, some web services use multiple wallets to ensure safety of their bitcoins. They only have one hot wallet and several cold ones in case things go bad.

Like what others said. Normal people create many wallets to avoid lose of Bitcoin if a wallet was hack. You might want to create a few wallets if you have large amount of Bitcoin. It wont help you if you have a small amount of Bitcoin. They fees for transaction (from wallet to wallet) will be very high.

lots of reasons.  privacy, security, separating funds, accepting private payments, the list goes on and on.

Sounds like your PC wallet is the only one you have control over. Coinbase controls all the addresses in their wallet. When you send bitcoins, it's the recipient that specifies the address to use for the transaction. So your only concern is for your PC wallet receiving address.. that you give to folks send bitcoin to you. And yes, you should provide a new address each time for those transactions.

It makes sense to have at least two wallets:
- One for the bitcoins you actually want to spend, in an app like blockchain or coinbase
- A cold storage wallet, for the coins you want to hodl