Hello once again everybody!
In today’s article, we’re going to cover two topics: Coin Control functionality in the QT Wallet, and Electra Foundation funds.
A few weeks ago there was some confusion around the community with regards to what appeared to be the movement of funds from out of the foundation wallet. Really in effect, the balance shown in the block explorer was just less than what was actually held in the wallet. Hopefully, with this explanation, you can gain a deeper understanding of the QT Wallet, Coin Control, and be better equipt to accurately interpret the Electra Block Explorer.
To begin, we need to access the Coin Control feature within the QT Wallet. You can do this by following the navigation below:
Settings > Options > DIsplay
From here check the box “Display Coins Control Features (Experts Only)”
After unlocking the Coin Control feature you should go to your “Send” tab and you will see a new “Coin Control Features” heading at the top with an “Inputs” button just beneath it, click the “Inputs” button to continue.
Once you’ve done all that, you will arrive at a screen like the one below (albeit with the full tree of inputs already shown, you can simply collapse this).
Here we have the actual foundation wallet shown, this particular wallet is written in Dutch, however, it has all the same buttons and placements as an English version would have.
Next, please make sure “Tree Mode” is selected, that’s “Boom Modus” in Dutch.
The first input line (the one with the #12 off to the side) is your basic wallet address and shows your full wallet balance. What most people don’t see in their wallet is what goes on behind the scenes on the blockchain itself — this can be seen in the inputs beneath the first line that all combine to reach your total amount.
Next up we have the payments made to the CoinDeal contest winners. In total, 7 separate transactions were made for the payout, however, on the Block Explorer 8 transactions are shown. The “odd transaction” out has been circled in black.
This next part can get a bit confusing, but I’ll try to make it as easy to follow as possible.
So, we have identified the “odd transaction” out from amongst the other transactions that were made for the CoinDeal contest payout.
Next, if we scroll back down 3 transactions on the block explorer we can see the original deposit of funds that later appeared to be getting moved out in the CoinDeal transactions.
Now, if you look at the address from the CoinDeal contest transaction and the address of the original deposit of funds you will see that they’re in fact the same. This isn’t a coincidence. When the 5,421,548 ECA was first deposited into the foundation’s wallet it created a new input on top of the total holdings of the foundation’s wallet. (This input using the original deposit address of EYPFYiy3gkS7ENJ8zFfctMXrFdiBggh2Fc)
The CoinDeal contest payout was the first time any ECA was moved OUT of the wallet since the 5,421,548 ECA was deposited, so what the blockchain does in the case of moving funds out is to check for the most recent input that holds enough funds to complete the transaction; in this case it was the input holding the 5,421,548 ECA. But, because the input holds more funds than the total amount sent in the transaction, the input splits and sends the remaining amount back into your wallet — this results in an extra transaction, in our case, this is the “odd transaction” of 4,496,548 ECA that we circled in the CoinDeal payout image. When this kind of event occurs the blockchain creates a new address for remaining funds being sent back to the original wallet.
So, in the wallet, the total amount is not changing, but on the blockchain, changes are in fact being made — namely the splitting of wallet inputs and the changing of the corresponding addresses.
This is basically how the confusion with the community first got started — when people looked up the original foundation wallet address they noticed that 5,421,548 ECA was sent out for the CoinDeal payout, presumably meaning that an extra 4,496,548 ECA was also sent out and thus was “missing”.
In reality, the funds were still within the wallet — they just got moved from their original address to a new one still within the same wallet as a result of the original input splitting when the CoinDeal transaction was made. (A single wallet can hold multiple deposit addresses)
…
OK, now that we have that bit of business sorted we can get to a bit of education on the use of Coin Control within the QT Wallet.
So, in this example, I’ll show how we used Coin Control to group together all of the inputs within the foundation’s wallet under the original, single, address — resulting in the block explorer showing the total amount of funds under the original address.
Once again we have this picture.
This is where you want to start grouping your inputs together (assuming you want to combine them of course). Because this wallet holds more than 100M ECA it will require an additional transaction. This is because a single transaction cannot be larger than 99,999,999.99 ECA.
So what I’m going to do next is to select the first two inputs, as shown in the image below.
By selecting inputs you’re essentially selecting from what inputs you are going to send the coins. After this, you can close this window and then proceed to make a transaction (from the selected inputs) to, in our case, the original foundation wallet address.
In this next image, you can see the 99,999,999 ECA going into the original address and the excess amount being split into a separate input.
We’re almost there!
In the picture below you can now see the 99,999,999 ECA in the original foundation wallet address and a newly created input holding the excess amount of 4,626,797.951 ECA in the address Ed55JBPN7N7ecznqprUYmAioyFoQxdBuAZ.
The last step for us is to select the remaining 10 inputs and perform one final transaction combining them all into the original foundation address.
And there you have it! All of this can be checked on the block explorer and following this, the foundation wallet showed the “correct” amount. Hopefully, this cleared up any confusion and was helpful in understanding how to interpret the block explorer and use Coin Control on the QT Wallet.
*As a final note, split inputs are a fairly regular thing and while the foundation will do its best to maintain clarity and easily accessible information, things such as this may very well occur again. We ask that in the future people take some time to understand how the blockchain, split inputs, and Coin Control work — this will help with your own understanding of the QT wallet and help you to be better able to interpret the block explorer at a more in-depth level.
Special thanks to Aman Singh for helping on this educational journey, and special thanks to Bob van Egeraat helping me write this piece and gather all the needed information! This wouldn’t have been possible without the help that they provided.
Till next time,
- Trippy
