What Do The 33 Addresses Mean on Electrum

[Fergus128]

Hi,

I am very new to this and I made several purchase of Bitcoin over a four week period about three years ago. I have my coins stored on Electrum and have now almost tripled my original total investment.

When I open Electrum "addresses" tab I have 33 addresses listed. The first 23 are coloured green and marked "receiving" but only the first three have a monetary amount next to them in the end column, which adds up to my total current value. The next 20 also green and marked "receiving" have a 0 in the end column and the last 10 have 0, are coloured yellow and marked "change".

Can anyone explain what all of this means?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Fergus 



             

[1715001455]

1715001455

[1715001455]

1715001455

[1715001455]

1715001455

[ranochigo]

Electrum pre-generates up to 20 unused addresses for their main address and 10 for change addresses. This is known as the gap limit.

When an address receives a transaction, it's marked as used and another address is displayed to maintain the 20 addresses buffer. The change address is used when you send a transaction. As transaction outputs cannot be spent partially, the remainder of the funds after fees are sent to your change address. As to why it doesn't spend the funds back into the original address, it's for privacy so that an outsider cannot immediately determine which addresses is your recepients.

As an illustration, if I receive 0.1BTC and I'm sending 0.09BTC to B.

Me (0.1BTC) -> 0.09BTC (B)
                       0.01BTC (Change address)


As a HD wallet, Electrum uses different derivation path for both the receiving addresses and the change addresses but it is transparent to you. You will be able to generate both with your seed phrase.

[Abdussamad]

that tab is hidden by default because people get confused by all those addresses. you can hide it again via the view menu. just use the receive tab to get addresses.

basically your wallet can generate unlimited addresses from your seed. it'll keep creating new ones as you use up the old ones. you generally don't have to worry or fixate on addresses. they are supposed to be single use only.

[bob123]

Electrum generated a hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet for you.
This means a seed is used to generate an almost unlimited amount of addresses.

Electrum pre-generates 20 addresses for you and creates a new one each time an address is used.
The same applies to change addresses with the difference that 10 are pre-generated.

The 3 addresses which show a balance are these 3 addresses you used to receive BTC, the others are still unused.

These colors are electrum-specific.

• Green = Receiving address
• Yellow = Change address
• Blue = Address of TrustedCoin (2FA Wallet provider)
• Grey = Address not related to your wallet or TrustedCoin

that tab is hidden by default because people get confused by all those addresses. you can hide it again via the view menu. just use the receive tab to get addresses.

That's the kind of answer you shouldn't give to anyone.
OP didn't ask whether he can hide the tab. He asked what those addresses mean. Such an answer is rude to say at least.

[Abdussamad]

that tab is hidden by default because people get confused by all those addresses. you can hide it again via the view menu. just use the receive tab to get addresses.

That's the kind of answer you shouldn't give to anyone.
OP didn't ask whether he can hide the tab. He asked what those addresses mean. Such an answer is rude to say at least.

I did not mean to be  rude. You guys covered the basics like what the two type of addresses are for. I just wanted to add to the discussion by pointing out the tradeoffs the developers made in designing the UI.

When that tab was visible by default people would ask us what all these addresses were for. When it is hidden people ask how to get an address Damned if you do and damned if you don't!

[Mariusbtc]

Over the time you eventually end up having a couple of tiny (or not so tiny) balances on various change addresses, so how are they going to be used for future transactions and what does it means in term of privacy? In Electrum, I can manually set one or more addresses to be used for the next tx.

If I use two change addresses to make a transaction to another wallet of mine, then it would be clear to everyone on the blockchain, that these change addresses belonged to the same wallet, no?
Wouldn't I have double the transaction costs, using two addresses?

[khaled0111]

If I use two change addresses to make a transaction to another wallet of mine, then it would be clear to everyone on the blockchain, that these change addresses belonged to the same wallet, no?

For tiny amounts, it would be safe to assume those addresses belong to the same wallet. However, for bigger amounts, it's not necessarily true. It could be a coinjoin transaction where inputs from different wallets are joined together intentionally to make tracking them more difficult.

[ranochigo]

Over the time you eventually end up having a couple of tiny (or not so tiny) balances on various change addresses, so how are they going to be used for future transactions and what does it means in term of privacy? In Electrum, I can manually set one or more addresses to be used for the next tx.

You can manually select the outputs to be used to isolate the outputs from the different addresses.

If I use two change addresses to make a transaction to another wallet of mine, then it would be clear to everyone on the blockchain, that these change addresses belonged to the same wallet, no?
Wouldn't I have double the transaction costs, using two addresses?

Yes. If you compare it to having no change address at all, it would be obvious which of the outputs are for the recipient; one of the output will always go back to the same address as the change. Having multiple "addresses" in the transaction is the same as spending the same number of UTXO(unspent transaction output) as a public key as well as the signature has to be defined for each of the UTXO. There is thus no penalty with using, say 3 different addresses and 3 different UTXOs.

[bob123]

If I use two change addresses to make a transaction to another wallet of mine, then it would be clear to everyone on the blockchain, that these change addresses belonged to the same wallet, no?

Yes.

Wouldn't I have double the transaction costs, using two addresses?

No.
The amount of addresses you use doesn't matter.

What makes a transaction large in size is the amount if UTXOs used.
If you receive X transactions to the same address of type Y, then you'll need to pay the same fee as if you'd receive X transactions to X different addresses of type Y.