Bitcoin Forum

Hi: I read everywhere that bitcoin addresses are one-transaction only.
On the other hand, for example, bitcoin.org have a "Donate" address on their homepage.
Please, help me, how can I put on an address to pay into, on my website, that my clients could use.
They require that, and I don't know how, if an address is a one-time thing.

It is recommended for users to use an unique address for each transaction for better tracking and privacy of payments. Otherwise, it is okay to use the same address for donations. Just create a button to let others donate to your address.

If you want to generate an unique address for each transaction, try using Electrum [1].

[1] https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/merchant.html

It's only a matter of privacy.
For donation address, address reuse wont be much of an issue as it's displayed publicly.
Just make sure not to make a connection with the addresses from your 'private' wallet, eg. by using them together in a single transaction.

Can you elaborate "...an address to pay into", is this the donation address or something like an address to receive payments?

No. You've started wrong.
They are recommended to be for one use, but it's not a must.
In fact for donations people usually keep one (and only one) address.


And you can take a look (https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/3FkenCiXpSLqD8L79intRNXUgjRoH9sjXa) and see that they don't change it after each and every transaction.

Hi: Thank you very much, all four of you! It is clear now. -- I really wanted to learn bitcoin. I got a 20-books collection, I went thru. The problem is, there seems to be no such thing as authentic bitcoin rules. Everyone writes what he thinks. So, it is hard, to be sure of anything. I am sick and tired of that. If anyone of you know, what is truly authentic knowledge, please, be so kind and let me know.

Isn't it like that everywhere?  :D But you came to bitcointalk and that's a great step forward.
Here you can always ask whatever is not clear (just make sure you always do a bit of search/research first, since some don't like to answer to same questions over and over again).

Another suggestion you might want to consider is visiting a paper wallet site such as https://www.bitaddress.org/ or https://segwitaddress.org/ and generate a thousand wallet addresses with the bulk wallet generator.  You put the wallet addresses into your database to show a user (eg checkout), but the private keys are stored in an offline environment so there's only the chance a hacker would add their own seeded wallet addresses.

You can even do this for donations if you want to personalise each users' experience (it's also a sort of de-facto tracking / cookie)

If I am not wrong then you are asking about how to accept bitcoin on your website for sell products. So just make it simple, if you don't have much knowledge about bitcoin Marchant then you have to use third party wallet, like coinbase, coinpayments and so on. Coinbase required KYC, so if you do not have problems with KYC then you may use it, there is no any deposit fees (no fees for receive funds) and easy integration. But I will not recommend you to use third party wallet, it's just an easy option. Third party service means you do not have control of your fund & private keys because they are custodial wallet.

I will suggest to use BTCPay server (https://btcpayserver.org), it's open source payment getaway and you will have control of your fund with private keys. But you should have some basic technical knowledge in order to use it. You may use your own server, or you may use third party server. Using your own server would cost you and should have full technical knowledge. Using their party servers you have to trust them although private keys with you. Here is some third party hosting service for BTCPay (https://docs.btcpayserver.org/deployment/thirdpartyhosting), I think there is not much problem with third party hosting servers. There is also no need any documents like KYC.

Both option has given above, now you have to choose which one is best option for you.