Quote:
Originally Posted by EndTheFed
Let me make sure I understand your question.
A bitcoin wallet is a collection of bitcoin addresses. The wallet doesn't hold bitcoin - the addresses inside of it do. In order to have bitcoin in an address it had to have be sent there from another address.
Every amount of bitcoin has a public history of being sent from address to address - all the way back to when it was first mined.
So if you said that you had 1 bitcoin in your wallet it could mean 1 bitcoin in one address... 0.5 btc in two addresses... etc.
I'll use a hypothetical situation where you set up a brand new wallet, create a new address inside, and then I send you 1 bitcoin.
Now you want to send 0.25 bitcoin to four different people. Each of those transactions would be tied back to the original 1 bitcoin I sent you... and would be pretty easy to figure out.
If instead you had created 4 new addresses, received 0.25 btc from 4 different sources, and then sent 0.25 out to 4 friends... there would be no public tie between them. None of the 4 friends would know about the other - or be able to tell that you ever possessed more than 0.25 btc.
All bitcoin transactions are public... but it's not public which addresses are owned by the same person and grouped together in the same wallet - as long as they haven't transacted with eachother.
I guess that's a really long rambling way to say "it depends", lol.
I've tried to stay away from too much unnecessary bitcoin info in here but it does help to have a general idea of how it works. Let me know if that didn't answer your question.
Thanks for the detailed answer, I appreciate it. After I posted, I thought about it a little more, and my exact concern was if bitcoin addresses generated from a specific wallet could be proven to be correlated even without any history of transactions between those addresses. I was curious if it would be easy for a site like Circle or Coinbase to find evidence of gambling transactions if a poker/gambling site only used one wallet, but used unique addresses for receiving btc and sending btc to players who requested a payout.
I wasn't as direct with my question as I probably should have been, but it seems like the following quote answered my concern:
Quote:
All bitcoin transactions are public... but it's not public which addresses are owned by the same person and grouped together in the same wallet - as long as they haven't transacted with eachother.
I've been using bitcoin to play poker and bet sports somewhat sparingly for around 1-2 years now, and I haven't had any issues so far. I'm planning to increase my poker volume substantially in the near future, especially now that Bovada offers btc deposits and cashouts.
I'd say that I have a working understanding of bitcoin, but I don't really know how it actually works, lol. I think I'm going to actually take the time this weekend to read Satoshi's
paper, and browse around bitcoin.org in the hopes that I'll finally achieve a real understanding of how this whole thing works. Thanks for taking the time to make informative posts, EndTheFed, they've been quite helpful.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tradenine
id love to get a clearer picture of the methods available to get usd in hand ASAP after a bovada bitcoin withdrawal. there were some mentions ITT of localbitcoin as well as some visa cards. are there other options as well. how do they all compare?
I've used LocalBitcoin to cashout a few times, and I really liked it. You can easily find trustworthy traders who have 1000s of documented trades, verified documents and emails, which really helped assure me that I would have a safe, successful transaction.
LBC offers many payment methods for selling bitcoins. I personally sell bitcoin for deposits into my bank account. I use Bank of America, and I've found sellers who go into the branch and make cash deposits, as well as sellers who make instant online transfers into your account.
I would suggest visiting the site and browsing the available payment methods to see if there's anything that catches your eye.
I've also used Circle and Coinbase to sell bitcoins, but it usually takes 1-3 days to get my money. On LBC, I get my money almost instantly, which is really sweet.
Last edited by 300zxrider; 05-07-2016 at 03:43 AM.