Why do hardware wallets like Trezor create 100 addresses?

[rscholey]

If I understand it correctly the Trezor wallet creates 100 address and provides seed words to recreate these later if the device stops working.

But when I create a paper wallet then just one address is created.

What's the advantage of creating a large number of addresses and why do hardware wallets like Trezor create so many?

[UserVVIP]

So people can't track you.

Also, it stops thieves that can try to brute force the address.

If you have 50 BTC it is better to have it in 100 addresses instead of 1 address, because if you loose that 1 address, your btc is gone. If you loose 1 address on trezor, only 1/100th of your btc is gone. What sounds better to you?

[JeWay]

I think, it's for the secure of your wallet.
Cos, if you just have 1 address and you store all of your Bitcoin in it. When someone hack your account, boom|You lose all of your Bitcoin.
But if you store the Bitcoin to every different address, then if someone hack 1 address you'll just lose small amount of the Bitcoin.

[n2004al]

If I understand it correctly the Trezor wallet creates 100 address and provides seed words to recreate these later if the device stops working.

But when I create a paper wallet then just one address is created.

What's the advantage of creating a large number of addresses and why do hardware wallets like Trezor create so many?

One of reasons is that you understand from which source come the bitcoins which arrive in your wallet. So if you wait to have bitcoins from 5-6 sources you give every source one different address (and name) and understand from the address which source has sent your bitcoins and which not. Then do the needed actions to have the bitcoins which were not arrived in the right sources. This can be knew exactly from the address you gave to every source.

Same thing make every bitcoin wallet (at last coinbase which I use now do this and bitcoin core wallet which I used before).

[rscholey]

So people can't track you.

Also, it stops thieves that can try to brute force the address.

If you have 50 BTC it is better to have it in 100 addresses instead of 1 address, because if you loose that 1 address, your btc is gone. If you loose 1 address on trezor, only 1/100th of your btc is gone. What sounds better to you?

Can you explain how I could lose an address? Is that possible?

[rscholey]

I think, it's for the secure of your wallet.
Cos, if you just have 1 address and you store all of your Bitcoin in it. When someone hack your account, boom|You lose all of your Bitcoin.
But if you store the Bitcoin to every different address, then if someone hack 1 address you'll just lose small amount of the Bitcoin.

How could a person "hack my account".  If they did that would they not have access to all 100 addresses?

[Soros Shorts]

I think, it's for the secure of your wallet.
Cos, if you just have 1 address and you store all of your Bitcoin in it. When someone hack your account, boom|You lose all of your Bitcoin.
But if you store the Bitcoin to every different address, then if someone hack 1 address you'll just lose small amount of the Bitcoin.

How could a person "hack my account".  If they did that would they not have access to all 100 addresses?

Once you have transmitted some bitcoins from an address the private key behind that address becomes mathematically less secure. This is because some information is revealed on the public blockchain that would make it slightly easier for a hacker to guess your private key. Using today's computing power, this does not amount to any significant risk, but who knows what can happen with future technologies such as quantum computing.

So with 100 addresses each with different private keys this theoretical risk is mitigated.

In practice, having 100 addresses is only better for privacy reasons because it makes it a little harder for people to track your transactions.

[coinplus]

I think, it's for the secure of your wallet.
Cos, if you just have 1 address and you store all of your Bitcoin in it. When someone hack your account, boom|You lose all of your Bitcoin.
But if you store the Bitcoin to every different address, then if someone hack 1 address you'll just lose small amount of the Bitcoin.

How could a person "hack my account".  If they did that would they not have access to all 100 addresses?

Once you have transmitted some bitcoins from an address the private key behind that address becomes mathematically less secure. This is because some information is revealed on the public blockchain that would make it slightly easier for a hacker to guess your private key. Using today's computing power, this does not amount to any significant risk, but who knows what can happen with future technologies such as quantum computing.

So with 100 addresses each with different private keys this theoretical risk is mitigated.

In practice, having 100 addresses is only better for privacy reasons because it makes it a little harder for people to track your transactions.

Yes having multiple bitcoin address is minimizing hacking vulnerable. Many recommendations urge us to go for multiple address to save bitcoin to minimize the tracking as well as change addresses while sending bitcoins like Electrum has a feature. So, Trezer has a most needed feature whereas I could not find option to get 100 addresses in multibit HD.

[Kakmakr]

The main function for this in my opinion, would be to disguise your identity. Most people believe that Bitcoin become fully anonymous when you create a new Bitcoin address for every transaction you make. I guess the Trezor developers was building on that concept, to disguise your Bitcoin use to make individual tracking more complex and time consuming.

It is a nice feature and could help to keep your spending habits a bit more private. 

[tom555]

New addresses are commonly used in Bitcoin transactions for sending change back to the originating wallet.  So the wallets (even Core does this) create a bunch of private keys upon initialization (referred to as the 'keypool'.)
This is so that the client will have a free address when it needs to create a transaction and won't need to wait for a new one to be generated.

[turvarya]

New addresses are commonly used in Bitcoin transactions for sending change back to the originating wallet.  So the wallets (even Core does this) create a bunch of private keys upon initialization (referred to as the 'keypool'.)
This is so that the client will have a free address when it needs to create a transaction and won't need to wait for a new one to be generated.

The problem with Core is, that the address generation is not deterministic. That means e.g. if it just creates 1 address per time, you would have to make a backup every time, you created one. That's why Bitcoin Core creates 100 addresses in advance. (I think, there is still no feature, that tells you when new addresses are generated and you should make a new backup)
With Trezor it is deterministic, which means, you can create all addresses again, from the seed. So, I don't understand, why they also would create 100 addresses in advance. Creating new addresses doesn't take much time(I guess we are in the milliseconds area there) so I don't understand, why they are caching it.

[Kprawn]

If I understand it correctly the Trezor wallet creates 100 address and provides seed words to recreate these later if the device stops working.

But when I create a paper wallet then just one address is created.

What's the advantage of creating a large number of addresses and why do hardware wallets like Trezor create so many?

You know, if you use https://www.bitaddress.org and you create paper wallets, you could set the Addresses to generate: field to the amount of paper wallets you want it

to create. A fun way of doing it, is to set it to say 10 000 and then to scroll down the page, until you find a public address you like and print screen it.

Doing this offline, is the preferred method, and then rebooting after you generated it. Also clearing the printer buffer, with a hard reboot. Not 100% safe, but still a good strategy.