i have a privacy question
I send #bitcoin from my wallet to another person's wallet.
when a btc wallet has been used bitcoin create a new address which is good for the person receiving the btc.
but in the btc explorer the receiving user can see the originating wallet address and see how much bitcoin was in it.
so, where is the #privacy of the sender protected in the bitcoin protocol?
#asknostr
you seem to be confused about concepts related to UTXO, address, and wallet. These subjects are beyond the scope of a nostr post but I encourage you to study them.
In short you do not send bitcoin to a wallet, you do not send bitcoin from a wallet, a wallet is simply a piece of software that allows you to manage UTXOs and to generate addresses from your private key set
so the person who received btc, through a bitcoin explorer cannot see the wallet address was sent from?
anyone can see the inputs from any UTXO, sender, receiver, or anyone else
but again this question really suggests a lack of understanding of bitcoin fundamentals. There is no such thing as a "wallet address". And bitcoin is not sent from an address at all. An address is simply a string that is embedded in a UTXO that allows a transaction to be signed which spends that UTXO.
no wait i know the wallet can have many addresses. my question is the receiver see the address it came from. so his visibility stop at that address. but still it depends if person A only received once 10 btc ... and used only one address than person B who was sent lets say 0.1 btc can see the UTXO in the explorer.
so my point here is, should someone splits his btc into many internal addresses on the same wallet? or split his entire amount into many wallets?
a wallet does not have any addresses a wallet is a piece of software. Addresses are derived from public keys which are derived from private keys.
this question, again, does not make much sense. You cannot split your bitcoin among addresses. Your bitcoin is tracked by utxo's. Each utxo contains an address which is used to sign a transaction which spends the utxo (ie uses the utxo as an input to the transaction).
so for example if you have a utxo with 1.0 bitcoin in it, you can generate 10 addresses from your private key and create 10 transactions which spend 0.1 bitcoin each, and each one can assign a different address in the transaction. No one can tell that those 10 new uxto's are related because they use different addresses.
(small side note here, they cannot tell they utxos are related because they use different addresses but they CAN see that all 10 new utxo's had the same 1.0 utxo as an input.
got it. we are talking of the same thing just different terminology. got your point i understand it. so if you don't create those 10 addresses ... privacy is gone. that is why those mixers exist ( samourai wallets used it )
so btc miss this mixer capacity in its core protocol.
i am using the actual terminology related to bitcoin, you are misusing bitcoin terminology, so I cannot tell what you mean when you misuse the words.
A mixer is a way to mask the inputs to a utxo which contains an address that you hold the private key to.
yes correct. i misused it sorry for the headache 😳
related to mixing:
You withdraw bitcoin from an exchange. That is done in the following way:
You provide an address to the exchange. They create a transaction that uses some of their utxo's as inputs. One of the outputs of that transaction is a new utxo that contains the address you provided.
The government knows everything the exchange knows, and you are KYC'ed at the exchange, so the government now knows that the address you provided is related to your identity.
If you now spend some of that bitcoin you have withdraws you will form a transaction that uses your new utxo as the input to the transaction. You supply addresses to that transaction which are embedded in new utxos that are formed as a result of your transaction.
Those addresses can be used to watch exactly where all of that bitcoin goes, forever.
A mixer is a service that takes a whole bunch of utxos as inputs and a whole bunch of utxos as outputs and pumps them through a single transaction. You do not reuse addresses and the mixer thereby breaks the chain between inputs and outputs by mixing your uxto with many others.
So for example if you send 1.0 bitcoin into a mixer and assign 1.0 bitcoin to a new address, it's still trivial for the government to guess that you still control that 1.0 bitcoin and to know your new address and continue to tract you.
That's why when using a mixer you want to use multiple outputs with random amounts of bitcoin in each so that it is not clear which inputs relate to which outputs.
This is still probably not completely clear to you though because I think there is just some missing understanding there related to what a UTXO is, what an address is, and how they are related.
i think you need to start by studying what a utxo is and how they work.
grazie!!
The terminology was not perfect but the request was really clear and make sense.
I would just let you notice that you repeated 8 (eight!) times in different messages that he misunderstood and have to study, missing the opportunity to be of real help.
C'mon, a little more kindness.
Was it bad day? :)
I believe I was of real help and I do not believe I was at all unkind.
no i never said you were unkind. very helpful. i used the wrong terms.
You missed a message from someone else who claimed I was unkind to you in my responses. I was replying to him.
i understand that with bitcoin if for laziness you use the wrong terms might be confusing. 👍
still my observation remain that privacy is a concern for bitcoin give the huge attacks we get on our privacy.
Bitcoin with privacy would be great, but that's not how it works. Bitcoin will have to survive without privacy
but the bottom line is that i cannot explain any of this to you because you fundamentally do not understand what a utxo is, what an address is, what the components of a transaction are, and how they all realate to each other and to private/public keys.
You need to study first, then ask questions. You are not going to learn this stuff in a nostr conversation you must study the source material.
what I suggest is that you study bitcoin to the point where you can clearly define the following terms:
1. utxo
2. address
3. private key
4. public key
5. wallet
If you get to the point where you really understand what they are, a UTXO in particular, you will have answered all your questions and realize why most of them didn't really make any sense.
You are right, the problem is real.
Some mitigations/solutions:
- Have UTXOs of different sizes and do a proper coina selection when paying;
- PayJoin;
Other options using a L2, e.g. the Lightning Network:
- Pay swapping in/out on LN;
- Pay directly via LN;
yes i think there is a degree of luck in privacy for #btc and this should be addressed at protocol level given the big attacks on privacy we are experiencing.
i wonder if the #bitcoin developers are working on this.
also have we put into consideration that bitcoin developers can have infiltrators from the global elite?
