Bitcoin address gap limit

[BlockCheney]

I have one question about the gap limit in bitcoin wallet. If for example I create a 24 Word BIP39 Wallet in Sparrow Wallet and I sent some Satoshis to each one of the first 200 addresses. Then I decide to send the complete funds of all 200 addresses to address number 201. If I want to recover the wallet later on another computer using my 24 words is this a problem concerning gap limit?

[1715002786]

1715002786

[jackg]

No, as long as you've used enough addresses then your future addresses will also be there (generally if you haven't clicked a button to add an address and haven't changed the gap limit, it's very likely you won't have to do that when restoring your wallet from the nmemonic either).

[LoyceV]

If I want to recover the wallet later on another computer using my 24 words is this a problem concerning gap limit?

No. But it may be a problem identifying each payment (the labels in your wallet won't be restored) and your privacy (each one of the 200 people who paid you can now see the 199 other payments that belong to you).

[BlackHatCoiner]

If I want to recover the wallet later on another computer using my 24 words is this a problem concerning gap limit?

What kind of problem, is the right question. If you configure the gap limit in Settings -> Advanced, you will be fine, transactions will be shown properly, until the address of that limit. But, if your problem is privacy, gap limit is irrelevant.

If you connect to your private Electrum server, make sure that the gap limit you've submitted allows you to query that much information from your server. Otherwise, your Electrum server won't return you anything.

[ABCbits]

No. To be specific, most wallet usually check whether the address has transaction history (rather than check it has balance). Since first 201 address has transaction history, most wallet would generate/show 201 address plus additional 20-30 address (based on wallet default gap limit). But in rare case where wallet use non-default derivation path, you might want to write down derivation path generated by Sparrow.


Source: https://www.sparrowwallet.com/docs/quick-start.html

[odolvlobo]

I have one question about the gap limit in bitcoin wallet. If for example I create a 24 Word BIP39 Wallet in Sparrow Wallet and I sent some Satoshis to each one of the first 200 addresses. Then I decide to send the complete funds of all 200 addresses to address number 201. If I want to recover the wallet later on another computer using my 24 words is this a problem concerning gap limit?

The gap limit tells the wallet how many unused addresses to skip before assuming that none of the following addresses have been used. In your case, a wallet would see all 201 addresses in the block chain and not have to skip any at all.

There might be a problem if you sent funds to only the 201^st address because the wallet would have to know that it might have to skip 200 addresses before finding a used address. You would need to set the gap limit to at least 200 in this case.

[Cookdata]

Most on-chain wallet software has a gap limit of 20, so when your wallet scans the blockchain after address 201 with an addition of 20 wallet addresses(up to 222), it will stop searching at 223 when it found nothing on the address. You have no problems displaying your previously used addresses.
 

No. But it may be a problem identifying each payment (the labels in your wallet won't be restored) and your privacy (each one of the 200 people who paid you can now see the 199 other payments that belong to you).

Maybe the user has forgone privacy to reduce future transaction fees by payment batching and utxo consolidation.

[NotATether]

No. But it may be a problem identifying each payment (the labels in your wallet won't be restored) and your privacy (each one of the 200 people who paid you can now see the 199 other payments that belong to you).

Maybe the user has forgone privacy to reduce future transaction fees by payment batching and utxo consolidation.

It's not really forgoing privacy as the user can always scramble the transaction outputs with JoinMarket or a mixer after consolidating all of the outputs.

Actually it would be quite annoying to obfuscate a bunch of dust transactions by sending them all together to a obfuscation service (it's technically a "double-fee").