Leave btc in Change address? Or move it to regular address?

[m3110w]

Hi All,

I'm a bitcoin newbie. I've got the Electrum btc wallet ver 1.9.8 installed on my Win7 laptop. One of the "Change" addresses has about 0.5btc. And one of the "Receiving" addresses has about 1.5btc.

Should I move the Change btc to another address?

Is there some way to combine all my Electrum btc into one address? Should I try to do this? Or doesn't matter?

If I try to send someone my total account value (2btc) will the send be successful? Or will it fail because my btc is spread between different addresses?

Thanks for helping a newbie,

Advait

[1714218775]

1714218775

[1714218775]

1714218775

[Tachikoma]

There is no need to move the funds from a change address. If you want to send 2 BTC it will pull it from all available addresses.

[m3110w]

There is no need to move the funds from a change address. If you want to send 2 BTC it will pull it from all available addresses.

Perfect. That makes it pretty easy. Thanks for helping a newbie. 

[twister]

You can also change the settings to not use change address, so when you send bitcoins the change will be sent back to the original address. For ex. Your address xxxxx has 1 bitcoin, you send 0.5 to someone, if you deny the change address in the settings, the 0.5 will be sent back to the address you sent from xxxxx and not to change address yyyyy.

[m3110w]

You can also change the settings to not use change address, so when you send bitcoins the change will be sent back to the original address. For ex. Your address xxxxx has 1 bitcoin, you send 0.5 to someone, if you deny the change address in the settings, the 0.5 will be sent back to the address you sent from xxxxx and not to change address yyyyy.

OK, thanks for the info. I turned off the change address in my wallet. Is there any advantage to using Change Addresses?

Thanks,

[dabura667]

OK, thanks for the info. I turned off the change address in my wallet. Is there any advantage to using Change Addresses?

Thanks,

Not using the same address over and over is a huge plus for privacy.

Disabling change addresses means that bitcoin sent from address "1ABC..." will ALWAYS send change to "1ABC..." only.

So I can 100% certainly know your entire balance whenever I want.

If you send to a new address each time, I can guess. I can maybe guess with a high amount of certainty, but I will never know 100% that the second address in the transaction is yours.

[m3110w]

OK, thanks for the info. I turned off the change address in my wallet. Is there any advantage to using Change Addresses? Thanks,

Not using the same address over and over is a huge plus for privacy.
Disabling change addresses means that bitcoin sent from address "1ABC..." will ALWAYS send change to "1ABC..." only.
So I can 100% certainly know your entire balance whenever I want.
If you send to a new address each time, I can guess. I can maybe guess with a high amount of certainty, but I will never know 100% that the second address in the transaction is yours.

OK, thanks. Privacy is good so I turned the change address back on. Now I understand more clearly about using different address to receive. I'll do that.

Hmmm... There's *lots* of subtle layers to this crypto currecy world. I'm kind of geeky so I really like learning this stuff. But I'm sure the vast majority of regular people would have no patience to learn all the required technical details. And I'm guessing lots of smart people are now working hard to figure out how to make it easier for regular people.

Cheers,

[emrebey]

it's not just about privacy, if you're a security freak look at this discussion on stack exchange.

edit: fixed the link.

[m3110w]

it's not just about privacy, if you're a security freak look at this discussion on stack exchange.

Thanks for the link. Wow, that's a whole other level of geekery. I got the gist of it but not all the technical details. It seems the bottom line is use a reputable deterministic seed wallet (like Electrum), back it up regularly, keep the seed *very* safe, and I should be fine. Sound correct?

Cheers,