Electrum 4.7.0 released

[LoyceV]

it only confuses newcomers, as they think Bitcoin addresses expire and lose their validity

I have indeed seen questions about this a couple of times.

Before, the "receive" tab worked perfectly, you had an address that only changed if you actually received funds in it.

That's how the software of some hardware wallets behaves: you can't get a new address until the old one gets funded. It's terrible for privacy: I want to be able to give different addresses to different people, and if some of them never get funded, so be it.

Once expiration time has passed, Electrum will issue the address associated with that invoice to another invoice again if it's not yet used.

That's not good. Say I give an address to someone who wants to pay me $1, but doesn't pay. Next time, I give the address to someone who buys my second hand jet, and I receive $10 million. Now the guy who didn't pay me $1 knows I own $10 million. It may not be on-chain address reuse, but it's still address reuse.

IMO, it's more preferrable for newbies to use that tab so that they may be able to unintentionally prevent address-reuse.

Based on my example above, the opposite is true.

[DireWolfM14]

You're talking about the "Receive" tab, correct?

Am I the only one who never uses this tab? I would hide it from View if it allowed me to.

I only use the "Receive" if I want to create an invoice with a description and a set amount, and generate a URL and/or QR code.  I find it helpful in some situations.  For example, I use them for the NFL Pool I host every year.

All I do is go to the Addresses tab, edit a Label (and still out of habit sometimes double click to edit, even though that feature hasn't worked for a very long time), and copy the address. I find this more straight forward than the "Receive" tab.
Note that I don't use LN in Electrum.

For standard payment requests I do the same.  It's easier to apply the used address filter to the address tab, pick an address, and apply a label.  If previously shared addresses are still visible, I'll know because they already have a label, and I can easily ignore them.

In that regard, using Bitcoin QT as a wallet is pretty straight forward, just click on the receive tab and create a new address every time you want to receive a payment.  You'll never reuse (or re-expose) an address, and you don't have to worry labels if you feel lazy.

[nc50lc]

IMO, it's more preferrable for newbies to use that tab so that they may be able to unintentionally prevent address-reuse.

Based on my example above, the opposite is true.

For that, you should take in consideration that not all Electrum users are as well-versed as we are.

For someone who has bare minimum knowledge on how to improve their privacy, then having the current default is better.
Once a newbie learns what to do to minimize privacy risks, then he'll find a way check whether he can manually manage his addresses in Electrum,
which isn't too hard to find in "Show->View Addresses".

In your case and other advanced users, the Receive tab isn't that much of a bother/annoyance even if you're not using it and it can't be disabled.
It only takes a little bit of space in the GUI.

Once expiration time has passed, Electrum will issue the address associated with that invoice to another invoice again if it's not yet used.

That's not good. Say I give an address to someone who wants to pay me $1, but doesn't pay. Next time, I give the address to someone who buys my second hand jet, and I receive $10 million. Now the guy who didn't pay me $1 knows I own $10 million. It may not be on-chain address reuse, but it's still address reuse.

This is why I've noted in previous reply that: personally, I'm only using that tab in testnet3 and testnet4 and most importantly, the note below it is one example of that.