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What happens if you want to send me a $1, but your only coin is $100, and I try to steal the change by not sending you the change, sending my own address the c

by trhtrsh 14y ago

What happens if you want to send me a $1, but your only coin is $100, and I try to steal the change by not sending you the change, sending my own address the change instead? Is it equivalent to me just running off with a $100 bill of yours? (A real problem in an anonymous street trade). I guess you could make change yourself -- splitting your $100 into $99 + $1 and then spending the $1. But for the network, that would look like you sending both $99 and $1 to new(?) addresses. Anyway, the 7M unspent BTC are all "change" that hasn't been spent yet. So your 99 BTC in your example is hoarded: You got 100 BTC somewhere, and spent 1, but you haven't spent the rest. If you eventually spend your 99 BTC change, it will be sent from the address that was formerly hoarding it. But if you get 98 BTC back in change to a fresh address, that's 98 BTC you haven't spent. But if you ever really spend that 98 BTC, then the person you send them to may be accused of hoarding -- if they use a fresh address for more anonymity. So in a sense all BTC ever recieved to privacy-defending users will always appear to be hoarded by their most recent owners. A better measure of hoarding then would be the 7M (owned by non-spenders) divided by transaction volume. But that is still weak, since the dimension of that measurement is Hertz (time^-1), and transaction volume can be boosted by churn across self-owned addresses.

bencoder 14y ago
> But for the network, that would look like you sending both $99 and $1 to new(?) addresses. That's exactly what actually happens. When you make a transaction, it takes a previous input to one of your addresses(or multiple if none of them are enough) and splits it, with part of it(the amount you want to send) going to the recipient address and the rest of it going back to a new random address in your wallet. There's no way to know which output is the recipient and which output is the change going back to the originator.

by trhtrsh 14y ago

bencoder 14y ago

> But for the network, that would look like you sending both $99 and $1 to new(?) addresses. That's exactly what actually happens. When you make a transaction, it takes a previous input to one of your addresses(or multiple if none of them are enough) and splits it, with part of it(the amount you want to send) going to the recipient address and the rest of it going back to a new random address in your wallet. There's no way to know which output is the recipient and which output is the change going back to the originator.