Bitcoin Forum

I have the following situation : I use a Ledger Nano s. Today I purchased bitcoin and the nano S displayed my account number that I used to receive my bitcoin. I just now looked backed into my wallet and I notice that the address is different. It does mention my same balance though. How is this possible ?

An address is not an account or account number. Every time your wallet uses an address, it will generate another. The wallet keeps track of all the addresses it has ever used, so there is no problem.

This is something for a little bit of better privacy. If you use every receiving address just once, it's harder to find the links between accounts and account holders (harder but not impossible). A lot of wallet has implemented this kind of thing, they use an address just once and next time they will give you a brand new address, which is also connected to the same wallet, so they show exactly the same balance.

The ledger nano s is a Hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet. This means it uses your 24 word seed (which you hopefully backed up correctly at the initialisation)
to create addresses out of it. You can think of it as a mathematical equation where your seed is modified with a 'counter' to generate an infinite amount of
public-/private key pairs (an address is the represantation of the public key).
This is not necessary security-wise but recommended for privacy reasons since the blockchain is accessable by everyone.

Thanks, wasn't sure what was going on.