Bitcoin payroll batching: what can employees see?

Your employer pays everyone’s bitcoin salary in one transaction. You recognize your own 0.020 BTC payment. Beside it, you see outputs for 0.035, 0.060 and 0.025 BTC.

Whose salary is the biggest one? Does it include a bonus?

The transaction won’t answer that. Addresses don’t come with colleagues’ names, and an output might be change returning to the company. But knowing this is the payroll run gives you a set of potentially related amounts to compare. Coworkers comparing their own payments could fill in more of the picture. This doesn’t reveal the company’s entire wallet balance.

That’s a privacy trade-off with payment batching. Several recipients share one transaction, which can save fees and simplify sending. Each recipient can also inspect all its outputs and amounts.

CoinJoin beforehand can make earlier ownership links harder to follow; it doesn’t hide the outputs of an ordinary batch made afterward. Separate payments remove that immediate grouping, although spending one transaction’s change on the next can leave a trail.

I wrote a short illustrated article about this, including a shop example:

https://medium.com/@molnardavid84/three-payments-why-send-three-transactions-73bf373408fd

Disclosure: I’m an independent Bitcoin developer and contribute to Ginger Wallet, Wasabi Wallet and Bitcoin Core.

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