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I have just installed the bitcoin wallet for android on my device and created two addresses. I transferred some BTC to one address and some to the second one. I thought the wallet will show the individual balance associated with each of those addresses, but I was wrong. Bitcoin wallet is now showing me one single balance for the BTC associated with these two addresses.

My question is, I assume that since I cannot send BTC out of each address for more than what it owns in the address (for example, address A - 0.5 BTC, address B - 1.5 BTC), I cannot send 1 BTC out of address A. But now since bitcoin wallet is mixing the two together I am unable to find out how much BTC each of them own...
Or there is some other way that I am not aware of?

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You are trying to use addresses for accounting, but they aren't designed for that.

What you actually want is the accounts feature of bitcoind, though I doubt any mobile wallet implements such a thing.

If you say explicitly why do you think you need to do that, someone might have an answer. Meanwhile, just use the whole balance, and create a new address for each incoming payment, without worrying about specific address balances.

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  • Maybe I got a very wrong impression of bitcoin address. I always think that bitcoin address is individually holding on to a particular amount of bitcoin. My question is, if I have 2 addresses in this wallet, AAAA and BBBB, how can I find out which address is used to send the bitcoin out? Would it appear to the receiver as two addresses? Or the wallet will just use one? – beemachine Jun 7 '13 at 13:15
  • @beemachine that's the point: every address contains a number of bitcoins, but you should (almost) never care about which address is used to send coins. – o0'. Jun 7 '13 at 13:37
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Very few, if any wallet client softwares will enable the user to view an address's individual balance. The client will handle sending amounts from multiple addresses seamlessly if a single address does not have a sufficient balance to satisfy request transaction amount.

The only way to do that is to copy the address to the clipboard and use an online service such as Blockchain.info.

If you are wanting to completely separate addresses and make it impossible to mix addresses, you'll need to use two different clients. It may be possible to use one of the web wallets on your phone for one purpose and use Bitcoin for Android for another purpose.

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  • Does all bitcoin wallet work like this? – beemachine Jun 7 '13 at 13:12
  • I've not encountered a wallet that separated addresses. – Colin Dean Jun 8 '13 at 17:54

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