Bitcoin Forum

Although best practice is to always use a different address for every tx sometimes you might accidentally re-use an address or someone might send you another payment to a previous address (for another purpose) and using bitcoin-qt you currently can't label the tx itself (although it may *look* a bit that way in the UI).

Whilst it makes sense to label an address and to make that the "default" label for a tx involving the address when editing the "label" in the tx history I think it would better to have that label just apply to the tx and not to the address itself (technically a map from tx id to label rather than the current address to label).

Without this it becomes impossible to fix up labels when the same address was inadvertently used two (or more) times.

e.g.

tx1 to address 1addr... labelled "payment for item #1234"

now a tx2 comes into the same address (assume this was not done intentionally) - if we change the label in the tx to read "payment for item #2345" then now both this tx and the original tx show the same label description (as it is not keyed to the tx id but to the address itself).

Thoughts or suggestions?

Armory does exactly this.  It implements "comments" individually for addresses and transactions.  On the main window, you have a list of transactions.  You can double-click them and individually set the comment for that transaction.  If there is no transaction comment (tied to the tx ID), then it displays the address comment instead.  You can modify the address comments in the wallet properties address list the same way.

Yup - seemed like the most logical way to do it - hopefully the same approach will be added to the Satoshi client as well down the track.