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I see a lot of transactions which have more than one recipient address.

Examples:

  1. Transaction 1
  2. Transaction 2

Edit #1: I just saw a tag call multi-sig-transactions. It is obviously what I am asking for.

I did not see in the clients before. How come that there are so many of them?

Edit #2: After reading little bit about multi-sig-transactions I am not really sure that these transactions are these multi-sigs. This opinion is not based on real knowledge but just on such a great number of these transactions in every block.

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  • Your title also applies to a transaction where you are simply paying two or more parties independently, but from the same transaction. You don't need Multi-sig for that, and Multi-sig is better described as a payment that can require more than one SENDER before it becomes valid.
    – Stephen Gornick
    Sep 2, 2012 at 18:48

1 Answer 1

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Actually, most transactions you see will have two recipient addresses. One is for the actual transaction and the other one is change.

When the output of a transaction is used as the input of another transaction, it must be spent in its entirety. Sometimes the coin value of the output is higher than what the user wishes to pay. In this case, the client generates a new Bitcoin address, and sends the difference back to this address. This is known as change.

But you can also add any number of recipients to a transaction so you'll find transactions with 20 or 50 receiving addresses too if you look around. In Bitcoin-Qt simply click "Add Recipient" on the "Send coins" tab.

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  • Just to be sure: that means if I expect to receive 5 BTC on one specific address and a person sends 5 BTC to this address, I will see in the transaction's "out" part exactly 5 BTC with my specific address? And I can ignore all other addresses if they appear on the list?
    – storyteller
    Sep 2, 2012 at 17:10
  • 2
    Yes, that's right.
    – D.H.
    Sep 2, 2012 at 17:29

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