The Round Amounts Heuristic, otherwise known as the Change Output Heuristic is used in chain analysis to attempt to determine which outputs of a transaction are sending to another party and which are returning bitcoin to the sender as change.
The Round Amounts Heuristic, otherwise known as the Change Output Heuristic is used in chain analysis to attempt to determine which outputs of a transaction are sending to another party and which are returning bitcoin to the sender as change. This heuristic analyses the amounts of each output to make a determination. Like all chain analysis heuristics the Round Amounts Heuristic is probabilistic: it cannot offer certitude. For example, if a transaction creates two outputs in the amounts of 0.8 BTC and 0.31838477 BTC, it may be assumed that the 0.8 BTC output has been sent to another party as a payment while the second output was the change output. Likewise, if a bitcoin amount of an output is convertible to a precise and round amount in a fiat currency like USD, it may be assumed that this was a payment and not a change output.
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