Bitcoin Forum

I just noticed that I have a lot of different addresses for receiving and that they seem to appear on their own from time to time.
I'm interested, why is it happening and how do you guys usually manage them?

I believe the Bitcoin client automatically generates a new address if a payment comes in on your "current" address, to encourage using new addresses for every transaction.

As to managing them, using labels I guess. If you just give every significant address a label, it's not very hard to keep track of them.

i read something about 100 total and didnt understand it, is your wallet limited to 100 addresses ?

No

The client creates a new address petty much every chance it gets. This makes bitcoins less traceable.

Not at all, you're thinking of key pools. Here's the thing. Your wallet file generates keys when you need them, but it can't reverse engineer them or figure out if they belonged to it without keeping a list, you see what I mean?

Normally, this would mean you would have to backup your wallet.dat file every single time a new key is generated.

To fix this obvious problem, Bitcoin clients have "key pools". Your client has already generated 100 keys for you, and every time you generate a new key it's just taking one from the list and generating another for that list. There is always a buffer of 100 keys, which means you only have to back up every 100 keys, instead of every key.