<p>Bitcoin Core's wallet interprets Bitcoin transactions as payments. A payment is sending money from one entity to another, and is independent from what exact coins were sent and how much change was given back.</p>

<p>When you have a transaction which spends a coin of yours A, and sends it to addresses X and Y, with X being an address of yours, the payment is assumed to have amount A - (value of coin sent to X), and to be going to Y.</p>

<p>X is not associated with an account because the software does not expect <em>payments</em> to it, only a single transaction output which is a low-level detail of how one particular payment occurred.</p>

<p>That said, because of this, and various other confusing parts of the accounts system and their inability to be used in a best practices way, they are deprecated and will be reduced to just address labels in a future version.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-08-12T08:38:34.230Z
2015-08-12T08:38:34.230Z
Pieter Wuille
<p>From what I understand change addresses are automatically generated when you use sendtoaddress but what I don't understand is why these change addresses don't become automatically associated with the sending account. What is the reason for this?</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-08-12T09:16:35.297Z
I'll have to double check, but I believe they're assigned to the default account, which is `none` or `""`
Wizard Of Ozzie
<change>
Why are change addresses not associated with an account in your wallet?
absolutelyNoWarranty
# Why are change addresses not associated with an account in your wallet?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2015-08-12)

From what I understand change addresses are automatically generated when you use sendtoaddress but what I don't understand is why these change addresses don't become automatically associated with the sending account. What is the reason for this?

**Tags:** change

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I'll have to double check, but I believe they're assigned to the default account, which is `none` or `""`  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_2 on 2015-08-12. Score: 5 | Accepted answer

Bitcoin Core's wallet interprets Bitcoin transactions as payments. A payment is sending money from one entity to another, and is independent from what exact coins were sent and how much change was given back.

When you have a transaction which spends a coin of yours A, and sends it to addresses X and Y, with X being an address of yours, the payment is assumed to have amount A - (value of coin sent to X), and to be going to Y.

X is not associated with an account because the software does not expect *payments* to it, only a single transaction output which is a low-level detail of how one particular payment occurred.

That said, because of this, and various other confusing parts of the accounts system and their inability to be used in a best practices way, they are deprecated and will be reduced to just address labels in a future version.


---

