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My Blockchain wallet address on the explorer, shows a low balance (under .001) but when I log into the wallet I can see what should be there about .25 BTC. My Electrum wallet is also doing the same. When I look at the explorer I see "unspent" transactions together with actual transactions.

It seems there are what seems like sub-addresses or something that are holding the rest of the coins. At first I thought coins were missing but I did a transfer to another account and it went through fine even though it was for more btc than what the exporer showed I had.... Confused to say the least,.. Thanks in advance for any insight.

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You don't have just one address. It is normal for a wallet to hold your coins distributed across many different addresses. This is for privacy, since it makes it harder for the public to determine your total coin holdings. For instance, whenever you ask someone to pay you, you would usually generate a brand new address that you have never used before and ask them to pay that address. That's what the "receive" function on most wallets would do.

It is possible for a transaction to draw coins from more than one address. Your wallet does this automatically when you make a transaction that is larger than the balance of any single address.

Your wallets may have a way to show all your addresses which currently contain coins; you could look those up in a block explorer and the total should come out right (assuming all your incoming and outgoing transactions have confirmed).

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  • Thank you Nate,.. Not to be a pain,.. but this opens more questions. All these transactions of moving coins or tokens around to perform 1 transaction,.. I do not see any additional fees.?? Your answer really helped me as I was quite concerned last night when I was thinking the worst.
    – CoinQuest
    Commented Jul 2, 2017 at 21:17
  • @CoinQuest: There won't be additional transactions to move coins around. The wallet will encourage you to keep coins in separate addresses by generating multiple receive addresses, but it won't move them unless you tell it to. A transaction drawing from many addresses is still just one transaction - but it will be more bytes, so the fee for that single transaction will be somewhat higher than otherwise.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Jul 2, 2017 at 21:24
  • Another way this happens is that when you send coins out, the change (see Murch's link above) will typically be sent to a different address than where the coins came from.
    – Nate Eldredge
    Commented Jul 2, 2017 at 21:26
  • Steep learning curv Nate. I do enjoy the insight. Many different facets to these transactions. Didn't realize you had responded the second response, sorry. .
    – CoinQuest
    Commented Jul 11, 2017 at 2:21

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