Bitcoin Forum

I have a question about this address that I created..

https://i.imgur.com/p3zdBMq.jpg

I make the address permanent...

https://i.imgur.com/Z8SWJ2i.jpg

Is the address not usable anymore after 1 transaction is made? or I can use it as an address in a signature campaign making a lot of trannsactions?

Electrum (and Bitcoin) addresses do not expire. The payment requests that are made specifically only uses each receiving address once only for better record keeping and privacy. It is perfectly fine to use it for multiple transactions, it'll stay valid.

As long as you have your seed phrase (and passphrase if included) or private key to your address, you are good to be using the address for transactions just like using it for signature campaigns on this forums. But, for privacy reasons, it is not good to make use of only one address, so that your whole funds should not be tracked to one address, but their are exceptional cases like using it for signature campaign on this forum in which you have no option, it has nothing to do with your security and the address will always remain valid as long as you have the seed phrase (and passphrase if included) or private key to the address.

All of your addresses can be used forever and for multiple transactions.
You don't even need to set the expiration time to "Never". As stated by ranochigo, there is no expiration for a bitcoin address.

The purpose of having expiration time for a bitcoin address in electrum is know whether you have received the fund in time or not.
Let's say I want to sell something to you with bitcoin. I tell you that you must send me bitcoin in 1 hour. Otherwise, I won't accept the transaction
I give you an address and set the expiration time to 1 hour. In this way, electrum will show that whether you have sent the fund before the deadline or not.

So I can use it as an address in the signature campaign, right? I was just a confusing since it says "unpaid" so I was thinking after the transaction is done the address is not usable anymore.

I didn't use my electrum wallet for a long time so I didn't know these new updates, last time there was a receiving address that is permanent.

Thanks for your help!  :)



I see that how it works!

Thanks for your help!

Yes. Creating a payment requests will result in Electrum tracking transactions specifically for that address. It is done locally and does not have any effect on the actual Blockchain or your funds.

The addresses tab might be hidden for some, go to View > Show Addresses and your list of addresses will be shown in the address tab.

I always thought that the expiration date displayed in Electrum was useless and only created confusion.

This is a nice way to use it. But I still think that this feature creates more problems than it tries to solve. And the name is quite confusing for newbies.

I see a lot of people asking about this "expiry" in real life and in this forum.


As address do not expire, they could find a more accurate term, as it is causing confusion. When you set a number in expire, you are actually setting a request expiration date.

 what expires is the request, not the address.

Completely agree. Furthermore, creating expiring invoices like this is a niche use. The vast majority of users do not use this feature, do not care about receiving bitcoin within a certain time frame, and do not want their requests to expire. It causes endless confusion and, as you say, we see user being confused by this on pretty much a weekly basis.

I think they should hide this behind a check box in the options menu, just like they do for the advanced preview screen. Maybe called "advanced invoices" or even just "invoices". If you don't check the box, then when you go to the "Receive" tab it just immediately displays your next unused address.

The invoices you see on the "receive" tab are simply BIP70 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0070.mediawiki) requests. I agree with you that it's confusing and useless for regular users so it should be removed from the GUI. However, it can be very useful for merchants who use Electrum on their websites and need to pass more data to their customers than the payment address (payment amount, expiration date, note). It also help them update the order status according to the invoice status.

Btw, Electrum removes invoices when they are paid and the transaction has 1 confirmation. This proves how useless it is for a regular user.
OP, after you copy the address you can safely right click on the invoice and remove it to avoid any further confusion.

That would be an improvement.  I agree that the invoice expiration feature is about as useful as tits on a boar, and doesn't really add any value to on-chain transactions.  Anything communicated by that feature could easily be addressed in whatever agreement arrived at by the individuals initiating the exchange.

IIRC the feature showed up in the gui around the time the dev team was implementing Lightning features, which have legitimate uses for request expiration.  Maybe it was just as easy to add the subscripts to on-chain requests, and here we are.

In actuality I find the whole Receive tab to somewhat useless.  I just use the Addresses tab to keep track of my used, labeled, and unused addresses.

Here's a tip: In Electrum, if you see any "(?)" or "Info", click it to know about that feature's function.

Given that, here's the help tooltip of the "Expires after" drop-down menu (not available in older versions):
https://i.imgur.com/8nROTqf.png

Pretty much everything that's mentioned in this thread.

Yeah... the expiry time seems to have a lot more use for lightning transactions that the more traditional "on-chain" transactions. A lot of the lightning wallets that I have experimented with require "invoices" to be created to receive a payment and most of them "require" some sort of expiry time.

On a side note, I'm still not completely sold on the addition of the lightning functionality into Electrum. I can see that it would be useful to some (and I know the BIP70 stuff was already there)... I'm just concerned it might be over-reaching and possibly overcomplicating things.