Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: New heuristic to group addresses based on its ownership
by
achow101
on 09/08/2015, 03:01:13 UTC
-snip-

How do you distinguish change addresses form normal outputs?

I found the refined version of Heuristic 2.

The simplest way is to identify the transactions that only have two output addresses.

And only one of the output appears first time in the blockchain (new address).

The new address will be identify as the change address.

 -snip-

Its not correct. I have seen people asking to send Bitcoins to new addresses due to privacy concerns. I don't think "heuristic 2" will work. I might be wrong though!
I see that a lot too with businesses, since it also makes it easier to track payments. I think a better way to think of heuristic 2 is that the change addresses are usually weird numbers. You typically sent some nice even number of Bitcoin to someone, like 0.10 BTC, and not something like 0.1876573 BTC. I think in transactions where one output is clean and the other is not, then the assumption can be made that the weird output is the change.