That makes sense. Any idea why blockexplorer.com lists a different balance of 0.00573768?
You are looking at that page upside down. The 0.00573768 is the first balance (after the mining reward that you received 2012-08-17 16:25:04).
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you'll see that the balance is currently 0 BTC:
It seems to be missing some transactions with only 39 sent and received. blockchain.info lists 46 transactions which if we removed 3 unconfirmed ones would give 43... ? blockchain.info is not accurate either for some reason.
The "Received transactions" and "Sent transactions" reported by blockexplorer are actually "inputs" and "outputs". I'm not sure why blockexplorer chooses to call them "transactions". A transaction can be made up of multiple inputs from the same address. If you count up the outputs to that address (on either blockchain.info or blockexplorer.com) you'll see that there are 39 of them, each belonging to a separate transaction. Then there were an additional 4 transactions each spending multiple previous outputs as inputs (giving you the 43 that you calculated from blockchain.info).
Ok, I'm somewhat familiar with that. I dont know the public keys but I suppose one of the commands will list all the public keys in the wallet for me, and then I can also fetch their corresponding private keys. And if I find the totals under all of those addresses and sum them up they should equal what my wallet says I have, right? That is assuming that blockchain.info and/or blockexplorer.com are accurate, which they may not be.
Other than the fact that blockexplorer calls inputs and outputs "transactions", and the fact that blockchain.info is displaying orphaned blocks that are no longer part of the publicly recognized blockchain, the rest of the data at both sites looks correct.
You can use the RPC command:
It will return a list of all unspent outputs associated with addresses in your wallet. I don't think it gives you the Bitcoin Address, but it will give you the transactionID where the bitcoins were received and it will give you the public key and the bitcoin value of the output.
You can look up the transactionID at either blockchain.info or blockexplorer.com. Or you can use the following RPC command in the Console window:
gettransaction TRANSACTION_ID
Substituting the actual transaction ID in place of TRANSACTION_ID
As long as I send coins to an address the total will stay under one address.
Yes.
Once I send from it then I have to take care to see where the "change" was sent.
Only if you care to know. The wallet program generally takes care of keeping track of all this for you.
I could then recombine my new address's "change" back with my original address, can I not? Thus having my total under one address again.
If you want it all associated with the original address you could. All you'd have to do is create a single transaction that sends your entire balance to the address where you want it. Depending on how many outputs you have and how large the balance is, you might end up having to spend some of that balance in transaction fees.
I suppose there is a reason this is not done?
Security and Anonymity.
Regarding anonymity: reusing addresses allows those who have engaged in transactions with you in the past to know how much bitcoin you have moving through those addresses. By using a new address for every transaction, it becomes much more difficult for anyone to know how much bitcoin you have stored in other addresses.
Regarding security: bitcoins stored at an address that has never sent any bitcoins anywhere have three levels of cryptography between the private key and the publicly available bitcoin address (ECDSA, SHA-256, and RIPEMD-160). Once you spend bitcoins from an address the public key of the address becomes public knowledge. After that the only layer of security is the ECDSA algorithm between the private key and the public key. This means that if a weakness is ever discovered in the ECDSA algorithm, bitcoins that are stored at addresses that have previously sent bitcoins will become vulnerable to the weakness. Meanwhile, the bitcoins that are stored at addresses that have only ever received bitcoins are not vulnerable unless weaknesses are simultaneously discovered in all three algorithms.
