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I sent 0.01047 BTC through coinpayments.net using electrum.

First I selected minimum fee option, then I went back and selected one level higher as the fee tier.

My electrum wallet and blockexplorer.com show different wallet balances after the transaction. This is how the transaction and wallet look like in electrum:

electrum transaction details

electrum wallet

However online blockchain explorers tell otherwise:

Wallet: https://blockexplorer.com/address/1HNN4AZkeupaTT5675k8s7XT4YCLUDpybK Transaction: https://blockexplorer.com/tx/3437ff74196c8f5b4b348c636a88f84773577c47979a6941ef378b79044abe76

I also recognized at the above transaction link that one of the outputs is "unspent" and the other one "spent".

Also under blockchain.info link (https://blockchain.info/tx/3437ff74196c8f5b4b348c636a88f84773577c47979a6941ef378b79044abe76) it says "Estimated BTC Transacted 0.01047 BTC" although a few lines above the transaction amount shows as: 0.02217459 BTC

Can someone explain to me what this is? Have I lost some of my bitcoins?

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The amount you sent (0.01047) plus transaction fee (0.00054597) totals 0.01101597. This is how much was spent from your wallet balance (0.09079308) leaving you with 0.07977711.

0.09079308 - (0.01047 + 0.00054597) = 0.07977711

You wallet balance consists of multiple bitcoin addresses. What you are seeing on Block Explorer is that one of the addresses in your wallet containing 0.02272056 was used, from which the transaction amount 0.01101597 was deducted, leaving 0.01170459, which was transferred to a different address back into your wallet. 1Gntc8EwpUXEhc7yAJsD25Y9YEBYTn6TnQ is a change address for your wallet - that balance is still yours.

The main difference is that Electrum is showing you the total balance of your wallet, but Block Explorer is showing you only the balance of the individual bitcoin addresses from your wallet that were used to make the transaction, including the change going back into your wallet.

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  • It is also important to note that a transaction must always spend all bitcoin on an address used as an input. If you have an address X with 1 btc on it, you can't spend only 0.7 of that. You will spend 1 btc, sending 0.7 to your intended target, and 0.3 to another bitcoin address in your own wallet. Nov 6, 2017 at 9:30
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    @BlackBeltBob an address can be valued by multiple unspent outputs, so that's not true. It is possible to spend only a portion of an address if only a subset of its unspent outputs are used as inputs. Additionally a transaction can use the same address as an input and output. Both of these operations result in a spending address with a balance after the transaction. But since the OP didn't know what change was, getting into inputs and outputs is probably too much information. Nov 6, 2017 at 9:48
  • Thanks a lot for the explanations everyone! Also, I realize that I overreacted in my question sorry for that :)
    – mus-kaya
    Nov 6, 2017 at 15:34

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