What Are All These Yoroi Addresses

Hi All,
I am confused about all the different types of addresses that I see in Yoroi.
We have a reward address which does not show a balance even though I have rewards from staking.
Then we have external addresses which people send ADA to.
I think some how this must move to the internal addresses although I don’t know how, why, or when it should.
And then we have the internal addresses which are some how supposed to protect privacy.
Here I noticed that when I consolidate the balances of internal addresses by sending the balance to only one then the rewards seem to get added in to the consolidated balance as well when it was not part of any internal balance before consolidation.

I would just like to know more about Yoroi addresses.

It would be fun to have a set of exercises to send small amounts to different types of addresses

Is there any documentation which explains why all these addresses are there and why we might want to move balances from one kind of address to another and also how this would be accomplished.

Thanks, John

There are quite a few posts, blogs, documentations about UTXO wallets. You can start reading about it using blogs below:

Also, Seb made a video few weeks ago which did go through kinda live demo about UTXO model. You can find it here

1 Like

Thank you @rdlrt,
One of the helpful articles you pointed to had a very helpful video as well.

I am still digging through the material but in the end I would like to make a puppet show for kids explaining all this.
I am not kidding about making the puppet show.
Thanks again for your help.
:slight_smile:

1 Like

So if you look in Yoroi under the internal addresses tab, we see the following warning:
Internal addresses are shown here for personal auditing purposes and should never be used.
Can someone please tell me why not?
I looked at Sebastian’s video, found here, and it looks like these are only here to help obscure the amount of funds I have.
But I am trying to make the amount of funds that I have public information to my accountants, and to law enforcement without giving away my private keys.
This way, if my private keys are taken in a wrench attack then law enforcement can easily follow the money to the criminals.
Furthermore, to me, this is keeping with the spirit of public ledgers which is to be as transparent as possible.
To this end I have moved all funds into a single internal address and made this address public.
The wallet still seems to work.
This also seems to eliminate the dust problem that Sebastian discusses in the video.
Furthermore, I have found with IOTA, because the Ledger Nano has limited memory there is a limit to how many addresses which can be used to make the balance of a payment. So with IOTA, I must consolidate addresses if I am going to use the Ledger Nano.

Can someone please tell me if there is any reason I should not consolidate funds into a single internal address?
Thanks for the help

For shelley addresses, you can link them (non-enterprise and non-Byron era wallets) all together using stake address which is unique per wallet account.

Try entering any of the addresses you see in explorer (https://cardanoscan.io or https://adapools.org) and you would find used addresses visible via chain

Great! Thank you @rdlrt,

Yes, click on any address in Yoroi and it opens a new tab in the browser which brings me to cardanoscan.io.

Here I will see an information box which displays the Controlled Stake Key.

I can give this Controlled Stake Key to my accountant, law enforcement, or to the public.
These people could paste that Controlled Stake Key into the cardanoscan.io search box and see all my public addresses which have ever held a balance.

That’s a great start for transparency which I see as a the best protection against both the wrench attack and systemic corruption.

Still, if I understand correctly, once the money goes to someone else’s address the money disappears into the nebula and cannot be tracked without a great deal of effort and skill.

So now I am wondering - would it be possible to put my funds into a smart contract which would prevent spending to any address which is not listed in one or more certified databases that identify the owners and also their Controlled Stake Keys?

It would also be interesting if the smart contract could black list individual certified addresses which are discovered to be compromised, and to use a multi-signature transaction to white list addresses which are not certified but are known to be safe according to those responsible for the accounts.

It seems to me that this would make global transparency optional for everyone.

Is all of this possible?
Thanks, John

You are and were always in control of what you want to show traceable wrt your own funds management.
Once you’ve sent your funds elsewhere, the travel of funds will always be traceable but more often than not an adversary will mix your funds with exchange and then law enforcers would have to identifying and working with exchanges - which is difficult depending on wallet implemented by the exchange for user accounts.

About smart contracts, over the past ~4 years, I’ve learnt not to go by thoughts/plans and wait for implementation before answering queries about future (coz landscape can change easily as far as we’re in bootstrap phase) - so instead of a “Yes for a way, not necessarily via GUI”, I’d say let’s talk about it when we reach there :wink:

No worries @rdlrt we don’t have to discuss optional transparency.

Please, I would like to know more about dust and dealing with transactions that spend from multiple addresses which carry small balances. The reason I am asking is because I have discovered that when using a Ledger Nano S with IOTA I must first consolidate funds so that the transaction bundle can be made from no more than two addresses. If three addresses are required then there is simply not enough memory in the Nano to create the transaction bundle. I would imagine there is a similar limitation with Cardano. I am guessing that there is a limit to the amount of sending addresses that can be used to send funds using a Nano because of it’s limited memory. For this reason I would like to consolidate funds to a single address. Privacy is not my concern - in fact, I consider privacy a security risk and an optional transparent chain a protection. So if you look in Yoroi under the internal addresses tab, we see the following warning:
Internal addresses are shown here for personal auditing purposes and should never be used.
Is there any reason other than privacy that I can not consolidate funds to a single internal address?
Thanks for your help,
John

I’ve not heard a single complaint as such in Cardano for over a year

You can, yes - privacy is not really an important distinguishing point for normal wallets addresses at the moment (unless you’re using Enterprise/Byron addresses which cannot stake).

Great! Thanks @rdlrt for all this help and information.