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I've been trying to follow a transaction with hundreds of inputs from different addresses and hundreds of outputs.

This is the transaction I'm looking into:

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/transactions/btc/0adc86b59ef3329c3d85eaafbde3ef071c6030e3b58386980e3122a68f679eef

I understand how a "basic" BTC transaction works but I can't find any reference to these types of TX around. Any reference or explanation that could lead me in the good direction would be appreciated.

Vojtěch Strnad
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Nucklear
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1 Answers1

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You are looking at a CoinJoin transaction, likely created by Wasabi. It's a type of collaborative transaction that mixes the funds of many users together to break the links between individual inputs and outputs in order to improve each participant's privacy.

As an example, consider the first two inputs (21.47483648 BTC each) and first two outputs (20 BTC each). You could reasonably assume that these each belong to the same pair of people, but there is no clue as to which of these two is the owner of which output. There is of course much more going on here, seeing as the transaction includes a few hundred inputs of multiple different denominations, but this is the basic principle of CoinJoin.

Murch
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Vojtěch Strnad
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  • Ok, thanks for the explanation, this is what I was expecting but needed confirmation of what I was understanding. As this is transaction is involved in a BTC theft is there any way of tracing this kind of TX having that the same address made many TX like this one?

    One approach I was thinking is following dest addresses and look for coincidences or something in that sense, but want to ask for potential known ways to do it.

     – Nucklear Jan 25 '23 at 15:51
  • I'm sorry to hear that, but in most cases there is no point in trying to recover stolen bitcoin, the money is gone. Also see: How do I recover from a cryptocurrency scam? – Vojtěch Strnad Jan 25 '23 at 17:47
  • Yes, I understand it's almost impossible to recover the funds, I'm just interested in tracking the funds for educational purpose alone. – Nucklear Jan 26 '23 at 10:07