My understanding is that it finds an address or addresses that have at least the number of coins you want to send and sends the change to a new address.

So if he had addresses with 1000, 2000, 2500, and 3500. It would have selected one of them (the lowest one?) and sent 1 away and sent all but 1 back to a new address of his. In this case he would not lose them all, just the remainder of what was in that one address.

It appears he had only 1 address with coins in it. This is probably because he got them all from the market in one go. If that is not the case, then I don't know why he would lose them all.

Your 'wallet' is more like your own personal bank
It contains many different accounts. (in Bitcoin these are called Addresses)

Each Address has a balance associated with it, how much money is in it.
Your Wallet balance is the sum of all the balances of the Addresses in your wallet.

When you perform a transaction, it empties enough Addresses to make up the required output amount, but since it has to completely empty each Address there is often money left over in this case the 'change' is returned to you at a new Address.

In this case Stone Man did a transaction that sent all the money from 700+ addresses into a single address and therefore had a wallet containing only one Address that had any money in it.

That Address/Account was emptied as part of the 1BTC transaction and the 8999 change was returned to a new Address to which he lost the private key.

If he had not consolidated all his coins into one Address, he would have lost far fewer coins.

I think the moral of the story might be: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"


No you can't find out which addresses have which balances using the current GUI.

I think it is "very important" information. 
I also think it is important to be able to chose which addresses are the source of transactions.

This is an example of why the wallet metaphor is bad.

I just want to add my voice to those recommending strongly that the client have an "Accounts" Tab showing an Address and amount stored in each Account.

This would be a natural place to add backup functionality and provisos and warnings.

More than just Accounts, I'd really like total visibility into what bills are in my wallet, the specific transactions in/out, some total register view that has all the details available.  I feel like the UI is a bit dumbed down, and most of the early adopters are curious about the machinery, not just their total balance.

Just my BTC 0.02.

I would like to promote this idea as well (or something similar).  What happened to Stone Man simply should be nearly impossible from the start, regardless of backups.

> There was talk a while ago about building up a sizeable list of addresses
> in the wallet that would be hidden but used for change for future
> transactions.  The benefit there is that if a user backs up his wallet and
> something like this happens after future transactions, his old backup
> will still "contain" all of the bitcoins since it actually has the addresses
> that change coins were sent to.
>
> What ever happened to that idea?  I think it's a good one.

Since this post a year ago, this feature has been implemented as keypools=100. Personally, I think it is a bad idea and does not address the problem, only pushes it off to the 101st address. At that point, users will come to expect certain backup behavior and then one day (presumably when they have more 'real' rather than 'play' money) it doesn't work as expected.

Unless the pool is recycled (change is returned to a random or cycle of addresses) then this is far more dangerous.

I propose, instead, what is expected. The change should be returned to the same address that the BitCoins were sent from.

I understand this decreases deniability/anonymity. But if someone really is paranoid, they should really be laundering money through multiple addresses in random amounts at random intervals. Sending change to a new address is just an obvious 'paper trail' considering all transactions are public, it doesn't take genius investigator to follow the money.

As I was perusing the source code, I got the impression that each time a key is used, the wallet is topped off to have 100 spares.  I could have understood it wrong, but if I understood it correctly, I don't think it's the 101st transaction that gets hosed... it's the 101st transaction since the backup you have.  (e.g. backup at 55 transactions, you'll get hosed if you need key #156).  Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Wow , tough break:'(.  I wish I could help you .

That is correct. It still sets a precedent of false expectations. First of all, aside from geeks who read the source code, the majority of users will assume that 'change' is returned to the same address. In fact, most users will not understand the distinction between addresses and wallets, particularly because the client does not present the pool of addresses or the balances per address. As soon as a user learns "phew! I can just restore from backup", they will similarly assume they can ALWAYS restore from the same backup.

In fact, that is precisely what should be DESIRED. I should be able to store a physical offline backup of my addresses in a sealed container at the bottom of the ocean. I should be able to give a sealed copy of the keys to my lawyer to be opened by my next of kin upon my death, which I hope will be a hundred years from now.

Let's not focus entirely on anonymity and encryption, while making it very difficult to hold on to our money. A cycle of 100 static RECYCLED keys is probably good enough for most casual users. Let the paranoid pre-generate a billion keys, but then keep it STATIC until the end of time. Or just use one address per wallet and let the paranoid launder their money using a predictable process.

dont worry, its only ~78 000 dollars.








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