URGENT - Does The Payment Request Expire Or The Address Itself?

[GlobalProtection]

Someone with whom I am in contact, and is not a member here, asked me to ask this question on the forum here and get an answer that will solve it for him:


He generated a new address in his Electrum wallet about 12 hours ago and then went to his Poloniex account and requested a BTC transfer to that address not knowing that Poloniex is now taking up to 24 hours to process withdrawal transactions.


So after he clicks on receive on his Electrum wallet, he sees what is in his wallet, and also a pending transaction is showing. I understand from what he wrote to me that the Electrum wallet gives him a message that the address or payment request ( he made about 12 hours ago ) expires in about 12 hours.


When he investigated withdrawal problems at Poloniex they tell their members not to use expiring addresses as the funds could be lost. But he did not want to create an expiring address with Electrum and he did not know that Poloniex can take up to 24 hours to process withdrawals.


Is this person standing in deep horse crap by being in danger of losing the BTC that may not be sent in time to his expiring electrum BTC address?


Do electrum addresses expire and the BTC sent to them after 24 hours is lost?


What can I tell him so he can act in time and save his BTC if need be?


Thank you.

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[ranochigo]

Addresses do not expire. Payment requests are for record keeping only and is only local within that specific Electrum client. Addresses do not ever expire and the funds are still safe.

[jackg]

Yeah like above. Addresses can't and don't expire.

Invoices can expire but sometimes that isn't checked (the time is more so electrum can forget the invoice after expiry if payment isn't received).

[GlobalProtection]

In order to help other newbies in the future, would it be too much for someone to edit the message to read:  "This payment invoice expires in ...... hours."

That way, Poloniex will not scare others when they tell people not to use an expiring address. I think that it is impossible for an address to expire anyway, don't you?  But newbies do not know that.

[NeuroticFish]

In order to help other newbies in the future, would it be too much for someone to edit the message to read:  "This payment invoice expires in ...... hours."

That way, Poloniex will not scare others when they tell people not to use an expiring address. I think that it is impossible for an address to expire anyway, don't you?  But newbies do not know that.

Indeed, when you ask for a new address, it actually creates some sort of invoice / request; if you "Copy Request" you'll see something like

Code:

bitcoin:THE_NEW_ADDRESS?time=1615490998&exp=86400

Interestingly, I've never used that feature, I've just went to the Addresses tab (View->Show addresses) and copied and address with 0 tx count for my next use.

Now about your change request: I think that if you want to do that you'll have to ask on Electrum official channels, i.e. https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues

[HCP]

That way, Poloniex will not scare others when they tell people not to use an expiring address. I think that it is impossible for an address to expire anyway, don't you?  But newbies do not know that.

At a protocol level... that is correct, addresses do not "expire".

However, some services/exchanges use "one time" addresses for receiving deposits. Often, once a deposit has arrived, they no longer "actively monitor" that address... so if you send a 2nd deposit, it won't automatically be credited and you need to contact support to get them to manually credit you.

Also, you have retailers using BitPay, which usually requires "seeing" a transaction broadcast within 10 minutes... and that the transaction is confirmed within a set time frame or the entire deal will be void. To really complicate things, BitPay will generally only send funds back to the address from which it was sent (if a transaction is voided), so if you send directly from an exchange to BitPay and it "times out", BitPay will want to send the funds back to the exchange itself (and not your deposit address) and then you're stuck trying to deal with the Exchange support team to recover your coins

The payment request facility within Electrum is part of it's BIP70 support... which specifies a time at which the payment request should be considered "invalid":

...
expires   Unix timestamp (UTC) after which the PaymentRequest should be considered invalid.
...

[PrimeNumber7]

If you create a payment request that expires, it will be possible that a new payment request will request that the payment be sent to the same address if said address has not received any coin as of when the new payment request was created.

The above will result in a small amount of reduction of privacy, but your funds will always be safe.

If you receive coin to an address associated with an expired payment request, you will want to verify who sent the transaction before providing any valuable product or service of value.

[nc50lc]

In addition, the "expiration" is used by the wallet to know when the address can be reused in the receive tab.
eg. if the invoice that displayed the specific address is not yet expired, the next invoice will display a new unused address,
eg2. once it was expired, the address will be reused in the next invoice, unless it already received bitcoin(s).

In order to help other newbies in the future, would it be too much for someone to edit the message to read:  "This payment invoice expires in ...... hours."

The developer actually made small changes but it's not available till the next version release:
qt receive tab: change "Expires after" label and help text #7104

The update includes a clickable '?' that basically explains what's been said in this thread.