Mysterious Unknown Deposits

Hello everyone.

I have received 17 very small ZCash deposits into by Kraken wallet. Eleven of them were made this month. Each are only about 0.01 ZCash. I did not make them, nor do I have a computer lying around doing background mining.

Should I be concerned about this? Is this a hacker, or just someone that entered their wallet address incorrectly? What should I do with these deposits?

Thank you for your thoughts,
Rob

It sounds like a miner payout, you can check on the Chain Explorer to see if they’re part of a joint split, in which case yes, a miner has put in the wrong address
You could check various mining pools and type your address in to see if it’s being mined to
If they are newly minted, then there’s nowhere to return them congratulations lucky goose!
It’s up to the miner to ensure where their coins are going, not you, theyre yours now
If they’re just being sent from someones address, you could inquire with a shielded transaction message to that address, you could also look up that address on the Chain Explorer though this would not really reveal anything new

Awesome! Thanks so much, Autotunafish!

Rob

If it’s a miner with an incorrect address, how is that possible? Since there are 2 ^ 62 possible t addresses, how could one simply guess another’s address? A mistake by one character? Pish posh!

2 ^ 62 = 4,611,686,018,427,387,904 (assuming capital letters and lower cased ones are unique).

Even if you were to generate a million t addresses an hour it would take over 500 million years to generate them all.

In addition to that, how is it that one ZCash wallet could just randomly generate a duplicate an existing address (I know there’s no “database” of them)? I think statically speaking the odds of duplicate generation are very low.

It’s a mystery :zcash: But it sounds like free ZEC…you can always give them to me if you feel bad or somthing…I’ll give you a Z-address, though…I want to make sure I’d get them :stuck_out_tongue:

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Probability is low, but not zero, @phakov. Don’t consider it impossible.

But since he said it’s a Kraken wallet, I’d say it’s far more likely that they issued the same address to two accounts, or he was given a recycled address and the other guy is mining to his old one.

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well… you could define that impossible… In our lifespan it’s highly improbable, I would call it a singularity…

I said, “low”…never zero…even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time. The probability of generating duplicate addresses, however, is so close to zero that the distinction is less than trivial.

I was thinking that Krapen re-issued an address and now our OP is using it. I would look at the address on ZChain and see how many ZEC it has received and compare that to the amount the OP believes he has. That might clear it up, especially if transactions were received before the OP began using the address.

Overlapping customer addresses - if this is the case - is worrisome. I mine to one wallet and then transfer to Krapen when I need to do it.

In Monero there is an anti-privacy attack like this. An adversary can send many small transactions to an address whose owner they want to de-anonymize. When the victim makes a transaction that involves most/all of these outputs, the adversary can be quite sure that those outputs are used as real inputs. The shorter the distance is between this transaction and an exchange deposit/trade/whatever where there is a firm identity, the more sure the adversary can be of the victim’s identity.

Although it’s unlikely that this would be the case here (since it’s already an exchange deposit address), can a similar attack happen in Zcash, given the victim uses only shielded transactions?

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If only using shielded addresses then no. Every shielded transaction in Zcash is indistinguishable from any other.

an option if you are worried about it Take the extra coins and send them to yourself from a Z address to a Z address. This will break the history chain, create a new address on the exchange, send it back there (re-point any miners to the new address, if mining) and have a great day

Thanks for your thoughts, everyone. I think I have a clue as to what is going on. I think Flypool has changed how it pays out.

I’ve noticed on my stats page for the past week that the ZCash balance has not changed, and the immature balance is always zero, even though my miner has been going non-stop. This makes me think Flypool is simply paying out immature balances immediately upon maturing. The frequency of the mystery deposits coincides with the frequency of immature balances becoming mature.

Did I miss the memo on this?

Thanks,
Rob

Oh ok
is that on flypools site or is that through an API? I was using a flypool app that just kind of crapped out one day

all mysterious deposits should be sent ti me for inspection:wink: