Post
Topic
Board Electrum
Re: What is best way to maintain your privacy sending payment with Electrum wallet?
by
nc50lc
on 06/02/2024, 05:24:19 UTC
Electrum's 'Receive' tab automatically manages your addresses in a way that an address issued by an unexpired invoice wont be issued in another invoice.
Something I noticed on threads elsewhere is the fixation on receiving but less so on sending when it comes to privacy/anonymity by members in general.
That's because your UTXO (coins) are the ones being tracked, not addresses in general.
It's not actually "from to address" but a UTXO spent to create another UTXO that's why you can't see any mention of "do not reuse address to send from".

You cannot prevent a previously used address to receive to be shown as an input of a send transaction.
Because the UTXO that the receiving transaction is the one that you're spending, the address is just a wallet-representation of the script of that UTXO.

For the "fixation", Receiving to different address is a precaution so that when sending, each UTXO that you've received aren't automatically linked to a single identity (you).
Preserving privacy when sending is more complicated which requires manual coin control (e.g.: freezing dust attack coins, only using multiple coins that are okay to link, etc.)
When sending, as I mentioned, you do not want to link your UTXO together in one transaction by using only one per separate transaction.
But as I mentioned, Electrum's default behavior is to maximize privacy when selecting UTXO, but it's not perfect since it's automatic.