Do you HAVE TO make transactions?

[youdamushi]

Hello all

I've got a little question
Suppose I own 2 electrum wallets for example. Both are mine so I have everything  (private keys, seeds...).
I want to transfer 1 bitcoin from a wallet to another. To be honest it's just because I'm a fucking gambling addict and I try to separate my assets in different wallets to avoid sending and betting too much money if I get tilted...

It works pretty well and I gamble far less. But do I have to send the assets through network like this? Isn't it possible to simply merge or link the two wallets so that transactions are instant and without having to go through the whole network hence having to pay the fees and wait a lot?

It's not very important but just wanted to know if it was possible.
Thanks anyway !

[devans]

Unfortunately that's not possible with Electrum (and most modern wallets, actually). Electrum is a deterministic wallet, which means that it calculates all of your addresses from a single seed. As such, it's not really possible to "delete" the private keys to a single address.

You could export the private key for a single address from wallet A and import it in wallet B, making its funds available to both wallet A and B. However, you cannot prevent the original wallet A from also still being able to access the funds.

[devans]

Why would you have 2 different wallet if you can make bitcoin address as many as you want? In elecrtrum, you can give name/description to each address so you can separate your bitcoin for different usage.
Also, you simply can import private key from one wallet to another rather than send it to another address.

Actually, using several wallets for different purposes is a fairly common use case. Merely labeling individual addresses has a number of disadvantages:

• Electrum doesn't take labels into account when making transactions. That makes it easy to spend money on something other than its intended purpose.
• Whenever money from a labelled address is spent, any change is returned to an unused, unlabelled address. This means it's easy to lose track of money's intended purpose.
• It's difficult to see how much money is allocated to which use case, especially if you have many different labels and/or addresses.
• Unlike extended keys, labels cannot be easily transferred to and used on other clients.

[Karpeles]

You could make a transaction with multiple inputs/outputs(I think under tools-import transction or something, I never used so don't know how it works), but the addresses must be in the same wallet

Why would you have 2 different wallet if you can make bitcoin address as many as you want? In elecrtrum, you can give name/description to each address so you can separate your bitcoin for different usage.
Also, you simply can import private key from one wallet to another rather than send it to another address.

Actually, using several wallets for different purposes is a fairly common use case. Merely labeling individual addresses has a number of disadvantages:

• Electrum doesn't take labels into account when making transactions. That makes it easy to spend money on something other than its intended purpose.
• Whenever money from a labelled address is spent, any change is returned to an unused, unlabelled address. This means it's easy to lose track of money's intended purpose.
• It's difficult to see how much money is allocated to which use case, especially if you have many different labels and/or addresses.
• Unlike extended keys, labels cannot be easily transferred to and used on other clients.

if electrum works like electrum-ltc, then restaure a wallet using one or more private keys will create a wallet with the addresses, then anything out will go for them. One could freeze addresses to control where the change will go etc

[youdamushi]

Why would you have 2 different wallet if you can make bitcoin address as many as you want? In elecrtrum, you can give name/description to each address so you can separate your bitcoin for different usage.
Also, you simply can import private key from one wallet to another rather than send it to another address.

If you have specific question about Electrum wallet, you can ask here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=98.0 or see their official documentation at here http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/

You can do that?
Well I wasn't even aware of that xD
So I have 3 different wallets that I use just like... Accounts! And the idea is that I have to open a precise wallet to make a specific spendings.
It sounds maybe a bit dull but that allows me to always be sure to not touch my savings when I'm losing at poker for example!
Whereas if they were different addresses on the same wallet, the funds would be shared no?

Anyway thanks for the links man!

[youdamushi]

Unfortunately that's not possible with Electrum (and most modern wallets, actually). Electrum is a deterministic wallet, which means that it calculates all of your addresses from a single seed. As such, it's not really possible to "delete" the private keys to a single address.

You could export the private key for a single address from wallet A and import it in wallet B, making its funds available to both wallet A and B. However, you cannot prevent the original wallet A from also still being able to access the funds.

Thanks a lot!
Your explanations were very precise and helpful! I guess you answered my questions ^^
Well it's a bit of a shame that I can't simply make the transactions myself but... But what you're saying is still good for me! It means I can "regroup" wallets as I would do with addresses!

I might want to look only for labelling my addresses better though because that doesn't sound like wallets were developped with this purpose xD
Thanks again man!

[devans]

All of those disadvantage could be solved if users choose the input address they want, don't use change address and give very specific description for every transaction. It looks difficult, but some users prefer do this way

It's not just an issue of usability: Address reuse has negative implications for privacy.

Sure, you could manually choose inputs, manually calculate balances and sacrifice some privacy. In fact, most tools can be (ab)used to do what you want them to do, but why fight against the software if it already offers a solution for that use case?