Is there any privacy issue in doing this hard-to-summarize thing with Bitcoin Core?

Question

I have a "hot" wallet.dat with no password, with a small amount of satoshis.

Recently, I transferred them all over to my Bisq wallet temporarily to make trades. So the hot wallet.dat has 0 BTC in it currently.

If I create a new receive address in the hot wallet.dat and send the Bisq balance to it, is this identical privacy-wise as it would be for me to create a new wallet.dat and send the balance to it instead?

To everyone else in the world, will this look identical, or is there some sort of "extra tell" which reveals that I just sent the money back to my own wallet rather than "somebody else's"?

Both approaches are safe enough and both are menaced by address reuse. — Mercedes, May 23 '22 at 12:43
@Mercedes Safe enough? But are they the same? And what do you mean by the last part? — Binyamin, May 23 '22 at 12:55
You can read about the dangers in address reuse, and then judge whether multiple wallets are worth to your Bitcoin use or not. — Mercedes, May 23 '22 at 18:48

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 23 '22 at 13:48

If I create a new receive address in the hot wallet.dat and send the Bisq balance to it, is this identical privacy-wise as it would be for me to create a new wallet.dat and send the balance to it instead?

The privacy implications should be the same. By themselves, addresses don't tell you anything. It is the way you use those addresses that has privacy implications and that applies equally in the two cases you describe.

is there some sort of "extra tell" which reveals that I just sent the money back to my own wallet

Not in the way you mean.

Obviously if you, for example, later include some UTXO's from the new address with some UTXO's from an old address in a single transaction, observers may be able to make some inferences. There may be a higher probability of you unintentionally doing this if all the UTXOs are in one wallet.

Is there any privacy issue in doing this hard-to-summarize thing with Bitcoin Core?

1 Answers1