Bitcoin Forum

I have several wallets. These are dynamic. BTC address is renewed every time I receive/send token with them.
Is it possible to use one of the previously generated empty addressees to receive token once more in future?
How to avoid messing up with old/new addresses in any wallet that generates them each login?

It's called Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) Wallet.
It's more like your normal standard wallet only a new private key is generated anytime to make a transaction to make it more difficult to track your coins .
It is safe to use any of the addresses it generates as long as you have the seed phrase it controls all the wallet even the master private key too. The wallet generate new keys known as child keys from the master key at intervals. You can access the individual child wallet separately if you have the individual child keys. However if you have the seed phrase of master private key you control all the child addresses. And you don't need to worry about spending the coins in a single transaction as the wallet will defaultly generate a single output with the coins from all the wallets if a single wallet can't fund the transaction.

The addresses are yours and you can use any of the addresses at anytime and as many as possible times. Example are signature campaign participants on this forum, each campaign participants submit just one bitcoin address to their campaign managers which is used for payment every week. So do not be worry if you are not bothered about privacy.

I read few articles that said it's not possible to turn off the wallet to generates new address, so you can only save or track your funded address through explorer.

In addition you can learn coin control to manage your unspent transaction output.

Don't reveal your the child's private key and parent public key to anyone, because it is possible for that person to use both your child private key and master public key to generate the master private key. And from there it will be easy for the person to calculate all the other child private keys to all the child addresses and all your coins can be stolen. It means do not reveal the private keys.

It is a norm to use one same old bitcoin address to receive several payments. Your wallet is giving you the best privacy for changing the address often.

Electrum generates new addresses within the gap limits (https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/faq.html#gap-limit). You can choose to change that limit if you want to, but if you only want to be receiving bitcoins through a particular address, then just keep sending that one to whoever is sending the bitcoins. It undermines privacy, but does not pose any wallet risk.

- Jay -

You can reuse any old address as long as your wallet generates it, but for privacy reasons it is better not to reuse the address. How to restrict new addresses depends on your wallet. Mention the name of the wallet to get how to restrict the new addresses that you generate.
By the word login, do you mean logging into your account or opening the wallet file? In Bitcoin wallets, words such as login or token are not used.

I think some wallets actually put a sign of the address been used before there which can be used by to know that such address has been used in the past before. The ones used in the past are tagged ‘used’. So you can just select the unused one for a new transaction. If at all you need to designate a particular address to an entity, using a wallet like electrum that has contact you can simply save it there AFAIK

BTC is coin not a token.

You can use any address that's generated by your wallet as many times as you want, some wallets doesn't give all list of used addresses but still you can use it if you have saved somewhere else.

You won't be given new address until you find the provided address which means there will be no previously used address can have zero transactions in it

Depends on the wallet you are using. Electrum ensures you have 20 unused receiving address at every point in time (you can change this limit), meaning you should always have addresses with zero transactions. It also generates a new change address for each transaction automatically.

- Jay -

Start using a better wallet.

I know certain wallets may automatically generate new addresses for each transaction, there are better options that provide more user control.  For instance, I switched to using the Electrum wallet which lets me view all my used and unused addresses, and even select which address to send transactions from. This extra control helps me to more easily monitor all my bitcoin funds across addresses.

To have no hassle at all, use another wallet that will only give you one address if the changing of address every time you log in or access that wallets seems to be unfavorable to you.

That's how you shouldn't be bothering with it so, start finding those wallets that will only give you one designated wallet for your private key. But you can always use the old addresses that has been generated if you want to.

I hope for you to know the purpose and recovery words for every of your wallets (if those wallets use mnemonic recovery words). Because otherwise it's easy to mess up.



That is normal and by design to maximise privacy and avoid address reuse. A modern Bitcoin wallet will use any address of that wallet basically only twice without explicit user intervention: first when you receive coins and normally the last time when you send coins from that address.



Normally an address that has been offered to be used to receive funds but didn't receive any funds for whatever reason should not expire. E.g. Electrum would offer such an address again (ok, may actually depend on if a receipt request stays in the list of receipt requests). It doesn't make much sense to keep track of unused addresses in between used ones, so a wallet will and should try to avoid this.

But otherwise as others have said already, you can use previously generated addresses as long and often as you want and it makes sense for you. Keep in mind that address reuse can have privacy issues. When you give someone your address, this someone will be able to see any previously received coins to that address in the blockchain. The blockchain and transactions recorded in it are public.



There shouldn't be any messing up, but to be sure, it depends on what you actually use. Maybe you want to tell us which specific wallet you use? When you say "login", is your wallet some online wallet?

I smell bad practice because most online wallets are custodial and that means: not your keys, not your coins.

Any decent wallet should show the sequence of addresses in that wallet, used and unused addresses.

Yes of course, even if the address is empty you can use it as much as you want as long as you hold its private key or the HD seed of the wallet whose it belongs. On advanced wallets like Electrum, the number of transactions used by addresses is indicated, so you can easily spot virgin addresses. Otherwise you can simply check that onto a blockchain explorer.

I do use one software wallet from mobile. Namely @bitcoin_wallet (from the 'X'). Another is hardware 'Ledger X'. Both of them use a long list of old addresses. It is confusing in a sense of messing definitions of 'new address' and 'new account' especially for Ledger X. I'm still not getting the difference in between accounts in Ledger X and segregated accounts in it. Total balance is divided in several parts between BTC 'account names' and this is really annoying as I can't unite total BTC balance between several of these 'accounts'.

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My 'Ledger X' has an option to use Electrum as an interface to itself. But multiplying the amount of addresses is making it messy to conclude total balance and increases amount of fee unnecessarily.

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I certainly do hope so and yes, I do have recovery phrases for one of them - the hard wallet. The other one (@bitcoin_wallet as it's mentioned at their X profile) provides only backup files as a recovery meaning.

That's what I got so far.

Thanks a lot for such a good hint!


I just got curious - some of old posters here often put that in a signature and this is not bothering them at all or is it?


As it was mentioned above - I use couple of them: software is used for test transactions and as a playground for small amounts. The other one is a hard-based 'Ledger X' and serves as a vault for busyness.

And they both do so.
By the way - thank you so much Sir for your valuable comments!

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Which most certainly is very useful function used all the times!

We have many wallets that gives you more than one address and you can use as many as you want, also, any of the preciously used wallet address generated to you can also be reused as well as you sending from it, since they all comes under the same private keys, a good example is electrum wallet, that has generated many bitcoin wallet address for your single private key use, some users like changing of addresses while some do not.


You cant mess up with the addresses even if you import your wallet, the default one so the first one used and then you can see the list of others from the ones that have fund in them and you can also see right from the summary of your holdings.

Please, read about rule #32 of forum's rules, there's absolutely no necessity to post multiple replies in subsequent posts within less than 24h. You risk getting your replies deleted and it's annoying to other readers.

If you want to reply to some different recent posts you can easily insert quotes from the Topic Summary below the reply entry box, there is an Insert Quote link in the top right corner of every recent post of the thread.


Regarding accounts in a HD wallet. You need to learn more about HD wallets and derivation paths. For a start, go here:
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/keys/hd-wallets/
and
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/keys/hd-wallets/derivation-paths/

I highly recommend to work through the Beginners section on that site, too. You can learn a lot there!

Accounts are simply like different branches in derivation paths. The common derivation path for native segwit addresses is:
m/84h/0h/0h/0/0 (equiv. to m/84'/0'/0'/0/0; master private key/purpose'/coin'/account'/external|internal/address index)

m/84h/0h/0h/0/0 -- first external (=receiving) address of first account for Bitcoin (coin=0) native segwit (purpose=84)
m/84h/0h/1h/0/0 -- first external (=receiving) address of second account (account=1) for Bitcoin (coin=0) native segwit (purpose=84)
m/84h/0h/2h/1/2 -- third internal (=change) address of third account (account=2) for Bitcoin (coin=0) native segwit (purpose=84)

Your Ledger X should use this common derivation path for native Segwit address derivation. But I don't use Ledger hardware wallets to know for sure.

From a same wallet seed, you can have many public receiving addresses to use.

Read the chapter Wallets (https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook/blob/develop/ch05_wallets.adoc) in Mastering Bitcoin book, 3^rd edition can help you to understand it.

Using new addresses / changed addresses is good practice for your privacy but pay your attention on using UTXOs in your wallet too.

Yes, it's possible to use a previously generated empty address to receive tokens in the future, as long as it's within the same wallet and the wallet software supports address reuse. However, reusing addresses is generally discouraged due to privacy concerns. Remember, each cryptocurrency has its unique address format, so maintain separate records for each coin or token.

The amount of the fee does not depend on the number of addresses you use in your transaction, but on the number of UTXOs. For example, if your transaction uses 5 UTXOs from five different addresses or 5 UTXOs from a single address, the size of the transaction and thus the amount of the transaction fee will be identical.

Many are not bothered by it because the wallet address that is used in signature campaign isn't the main wallet but as a means of receiving Bitcoin before it is transferred to another wallet for privacy reasons. Example, I use the wallet address A to receive payment and send the BTC to an exchange for example and buy different crypto or use a service and of course, you must pay a fee before it will received in your main wallet. I have other wallet addresses in my wallet created on electrum which I can decide to use the other wallet addresses or not.

Thank you for your good advice!
That seemed logical to me to underline thought of the commentator but I made several mistakes on the way...
Your links are valuable sources of study!

What's the name of the wallet you are using? I hope they give access to the used and unused wallet addresses? Because this is the only way this can make sense, I believe they are called HD wallet.

If you find it too complicated, get a Bitcoin wallet that only has a single address generated unless you want to generate another like when using a Trust wallet, there is no point in using new addresses every time, I found such a wallet to be very annoying.

This doesn't improve your Bitcoin security in any way, make sure you keep your private key or recovery seed in an offline location, not in any cloud storage, not in any online account or email, and also keep it to yourself only.

You will not have any problem if you use any of the addresses that you have generated in your wallet. You can use a new address each time you want to receive coins for it, or you can use only one to avoid confusion.

I will repeat to say that receiving all your coins to just one address is bad for your privacy. Why is it bad? Well, if you send some amount of your coins (doesn't matter how much) to someone from your address, this someone can see all amount of your coins "on your address". Depending on how much coins you stashed over time, this might not be something you'd want someone else to know.


Funny how you neglect the privacy issue I described above.

Do you change your address every week to receive payment for the Signature Campaign, or do you just advise others to do so? If this is not the case, then why don't you care about privacy issues when you receive weekly payments to the same address?

Well, let's be realistic, any signature manager would show me the middle finger, if I'd try to change my receiving address for every weekly payout. I use different payout addresses for different signature campaigns deliberately and I'm aware that all payouts of a particular signature campaign go to one of my addresses.

So far I haven't spent any of the UTXOs from signature campaigns and before I will, they'd likely go through a mixer or into a Lightning channel, the current kyc-free exchange service I currently promote or whatever procedure I see fit to regain pseudo-anonymity of my signature campaign coins. I might throw them into a coinjoin later like what Sparrow wallet offers. There's a lot of options available.

You see the difference? I avoid to mix those coins with my other coins. If I'm in full control, I use an address for just only two distinct transfers: first to receive an UTXO, then to spend that UTXO and then not again, simple as that. If I'm not in full control and dependant of someone else, like a signature manager, then I have to accept re-use of an address. But that's rather a deliberate exception. I won't give a generalized advise to use one address only for the sake of ease or "not getting confused" or other silly excuses.