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I have made a transfer from one Electrum wallet to another one. When I inspect this transaction from the emitter wallet and from the receiver wallet, I see different that. In particular, the input transaction data is different.

In the emitter I can see the transaction ID, the wallet address and its balance. Something like (ID, address, utxo):

12b9003b752x9b    1f88cd918200d7e6dad91a5ace35f2ff1f88cd9182    0.25

However, in the receiver, for the same transaction, I see something like:

69e8f9e8b5:e4   <address unknown>    unknown

Isn't blockchain supposed to be crystal clear for anyone that can query it? Why the receiver cannot see certain information?

1 Answer 1

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TL;DR: everyone sees the same data, but some sites/programs don't exactly represent this in the same way for human consumption.

Bitcoin transaction outputs are scripts, which are tiny programs that control how and when the associated funds can be spent. Some of those scripts have a convenient shorthand human representation called addresses, which can be easily given by a receiver to a sender. However, there is no requirement that on-chain transactions follow one of the forms for which an address exists. In fact, addresses are purely a human interface layer - they don't exist on chain at all.

In this case, you are presumably looking at a transaction spending an output to a script which has no associated address. Different sites and software may represent this in different ways. Some invent their own notation, while others will state that no address is known for it. They're both right, though it can be confusing.

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  • In this case, when you say "address", you don't mean the address (derived from a public key) of a wallet, you mean the address of a transaction? How can I query the blockchain as it is, without "human layers"?
    – Martel
    Commented Apr 29, 2023 at 6:44
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    Ultimately, the address may only be known to the sender and the receiver. Blockchain explorer sites and other software guess this address based on blockchain data, but some (not very standard) address formats cannot be guessed at all either. How to query just the blockchain? Many sites and software are able to show you the raw script data in transaction outputs directly. Commented Apr 29, 2023 at 7:23

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