Bitcoin Forum

Just to Clarify:

Assume I plan to receive Bitcoins from a partner.
When I go in Electrum to tab "Adresses" then I can select arbitrarily one of the green colored 34 char long addresses
(and tell it to the BitCoin sender).

I need not to take the topmost.

And there is no hidden (auto-)refresh of the available green addresses. All green addresses are hard linked to my wallet
and stay alive until I use them.

Correct?

Peter

Yes correct, all the green address are linked to your wallet, and you can use any of the wallets to receive your Bitcoin from your friend

All addresses that are displayed on "Addresses" tab are yours and are backed up by your seed phrase. Take note that you will receive the fund even if you use change addresses.


I am not sure I am understanding you correctly.
Your seed phrase always generates the same addresses and you can use any of your addresses as many times as you want. (due to privacy reasons, it's recommended to not reuse addresses)

All of the addresses shown to you on Electrum belong to the same wallet. The sum of all the funds in each of the addresses makes up your balance. For privacy reasons it is best to use a different address for every transaction. When you run out of addresses to use from the address list Electrum will automatically generate new ones using the wallet's public key.

Think of your wallet like a tree full of branches. Each branch is an address and they are linked together to the same tree (wallet). You can use any address at any time and as many times as you want, all coins will be linked to the same wallet (your tree!).

If you have a copy of the seed, it will be able to generate the same tree (wallet) with the exact same branches (addresses).

All addresses in your Electrum wallet are generated once and last forever. There is no switching or refreshing of addresses that Electrum shows you in the Addresses tab.

Each time you use an address, another green address is generated and placed at the bottom of this list (same thing with the yellow "change" addresses) so that you don't run out of unused addresses to use.

In Electrum wallet, you will have colors for your receiving addresses in the Addresses tab

• Green: Receiving address
• Yellow: Change address

You can use both to receive your bitcoin because all addresses generated are available to use and receive bitcoin.

If you want to learn more about Change address, you can read two articles from Bizuma

• Who needs Bitcoin change addresses anyway (https://bitzuma.com/posts/who-needs-bitcoin-change-addresses-anyway/)
• Five ways to lose money with Bitcoin change addresses (https://bitzuma.com/posts/five-ways-to-lose-money-with-bitcoin-change-addresses/)

Since Electrum has made native segwit the default address, I am surprised that you are still referring to legacy addresses which are 34 character long. Although nested segwit too are 34 character long.

Native segwit addresses (P2WPKH) are 42 character long.

This means that you have been using Electrum wallet for a long time ago. Either you generated the wallet long time ago when someone can click on legacy on Electrum to generate legacy addresses seed phrase or you used console for it which newbies will not likely think or know of.

There are reasons someone can be using legacy addresses, but know that with native segwit you can safe fee 42% more when sending from native segwit to native segwit addresses.

After receiving coin to an address, another address would be generated for you automatically. Just click on 'receive' on Electrum GUI to get it. If you need another address, click on receive on Electrum GUI, click on create request to generate new address for yourself. Those are your receiving addresses. I will advice you to use receiving addresses.

If you send bitcoin and you have change, it would be sent to your change address. Assuming you have 0.1 BTC UTXO received in a single transaction from Alice, and you sent 0.6 BTC to Bob, the change (0.4 BTC) would be sent to your change address on your wallet.

Although, you can also use change address as receiving address if you like.

Yes correct, all the green address are linked to your wallet, and you can use any of the wallets addresses to receive your Bitcoin from your friend

Sure, like hoseinimr93 said, you can use that 30's address.
but if all have been used, and you want to create more addresses, you need more action on a console by typing:
then you will get a new address like (red) picture below:

https://i.postimg.cc/KjwCY4th/33.png

You don't need to use that command, if your addresses have been used.
The default gap limit on electrum is 20 and it automatically generates the 21st receiving address once you use the first receiving address, 22nd receiving address once you use the second receiving address and so on.

With using wallet.create_new_address(False) command, you generate one address beyond the gap limit.

Please I need someone to throw some light here.

Just like the op, when I created my electrum wallet I was confused about the multi addresses generated that I had to go look it up on google and I got to know that the reason is to give the user more privacy. Because I wanted to know which address to stake on the forum, I imported my seed phrase on blue wallet and it generated just one address which is the topmost address generated on electrum wallet, then I had not used any of the address to receive funds. It could have been any of the 34 addresses, my question is why did blue wallet generated or gave preference for the first address?

You could use any address you have its private key. This means that you could sign message from any of addresses generated by electrum or bluewallet.

Take note that bluewallet didn't generate only one address.
Select your wallet, tap on the three dots button at top right corner of the screen and then tap on "Show addresses". You will see all receiving addresses generated by electrum in the same order.
If you tap on "Receive" button on bluewallet, it gives you the first address. If you use that address and tap on "Receive" button, it will give you the second address.

Green addresses and yellow addresses, they all belong to your wallet. Whatever coins sent to any of these addresses, are yours and you will be able to recover them any time you want as long as you are the owner of the wallet (possess the wallet file or know the wallet seed).
Click on the "receive" button to get the address you need to share with the sender. It's as simple as that. You don't need to look for colors of addresses to figure out which one to use. Keep it simple!

Thank you so much, I followed your direction and I have seen the 21 receiving addresses.