Changing wallet address in every 3-8 years advisable

[Pikiboy]

I have been thinking about this lately and I want to share it as it becomes a something think about, although I don’t know important or how cool it’s for one to keep changing their wallet address. For instance, if I have some certain amount stored in an electrum wallet address and after 4 years I should be able to move it out to a hardware wallet address.

I want to know, does this improve and enhance our security level for our investment? Because nowadays the manner at which people are getting fished or hacked is becoming increasingly alarming which to me I felt it would be that better to either moved out our assets from wallet A to wallet B just to make sure our investment wouldn’t be a major target for others.

Your opinion are welcomed.

[Charles-Tim]

The wallets are HD wallets, it is not necessary needed to send all your bitcoin to a single bitcoin address. For privacy, you can send your coins to two, three, four or five addresses.

That is for privacy and not security. If you re referring to security, it does not help.

Use cold wallet if the amount is huge. Use passphrase of long and different characters. You can have more than one wallets, but making sure that they are also secure and safe.

[Asiska02]

I want to know, does this improve and enhance our security level for our investment? Because nowadays the manner at which people are getting fished or hacked is becoming increasingly alarming which to me I felt it would be that better to either moved out our assets from wallet A to wallet B just to make sure our investment wouldn’t be a major target for others.

Your opinion are welcomed.

The reasons to fear that your investment may likely be that it has being compromised and you fear a potential hack, moving your money out into another wallet will really help you to avoid that. Even after moving and you still maintain the same practice as before that exposes the former assets to face compromising, then you’re not still free and your asset will still be exposed again and again to a potential hack yet again.

As long as you keep your seedphrase very safe and from the reach of the public’s, you don’t have a problem changing wallet after some years to move your funds into another one. It may enhance your security to you, but it does not still gives the most effective and best practices.

[Cookdata]

I have been thinking about this lately and I want to share it as it becomes a something think about, although I don’t know important or how cool it’s for one to keep changing their wallet address. For instance, if I have some certain amount stored in an electrum wallet address and after 4 years I should be able to move it out to a hardware wallet address.

Electrum is one of the best wallet but it is not the best way to keep Bitcoin for long term unless you intend to use electrum as an airgap, that's good. If the plan is to keep the Bitcoin for long term in large quantities, then get a hardware wallet.

There is nothing wrong in changing address, some institutions did it recently because they found out they have done a transaction with the address which expose their public key and to be safe against any attack on public keys unaware, they moved their coins to a fresh address.

I want to know, does this improve and enhance our security level for our investment? Because nowadays the manner at which people are getting fished or hacked is becoming increasingly alarming which to me I felt it would be that better to either moved out our assets from wallet A to wallet B just to make sure our investment wouldn’t be a major target for others.

Your opinion are welcomed.

You are talking about Coldcard victims, that's a bad job on entropy and the hardware wallet generated a small possibility, this made the job easy for the hackers. Anyone could have been a victim if you bought this hardware wallet, and it doesn't matter if you change address, the seed phrase is already weak and if you generate another one from the same wallet, it will be the same.

Your priority shouldn't be address only, you should focus on how to create a secure seed phrase with random entropy, you can add a passphrase. If you do that with a good wallet, even if you don't change address you have no problem as long as your seed phrase is secured properly.

[Karl_3000]

You are talking about Coldcard victims, that's a bad job on entropy and the hardware wallet generated a small possibility, this made the job easy for the hackers. Anyone could have been a victim if you bought this hardware wallet, and it doesn't matter if you change address, the seed phrase is already weak and if you generate another one from the same wallet, it will be the same.

Your priority shouldn't be address only, you should focus on how to create a secure seed phrase with random entropy, you can add a passphrase. If you do that with a good wallet, even if you don't change address you have no problem as long as your seed phrase is secured properly.

Not everyone can be the victim, those people that used passphrase that is difficult to be known were not affected. The people that used the hardware wallet to generate a multisig wallet were also not affected if the wallet has multisig.

I am of the opinion that people should not rely only on the entropy even if it is safe, they should use passphrase or go for multisig.

[PrivacyG]

It does no thing to the security of your Bitcoin.  The only thing it can help with is if you want to move to a SegWit Address, if you want to move to an Address that has not been spent from in the past to make sure your Public Key has never been exposed or if you are worried that your Seed may have been compromised so you move to a Seed generated in a safe way that will never interact with the outside world.  As in moving them to an Airgapped device.

Moving them with no real reason is only going to increase risks.  The clipboard scam, the malware, the number of really unnecessary transactions for no reason.  You increase, not decrease risks.

[RGBTC]

Because nowadays the manner at which people are getting fished or hacked is becoming increasingly alarming

Phishing attacks are usually spread randomly and en masse (emails, ads, articels, ect) and it doesn't matter whether you have multiple addresses or how you set your privacy. When you are impulsively driven to write your key backups containing btc into their trap page, your btc will be wiped out.

[BlackBoss_]

I have been thinking about this lately and I want to share it as it becomes a something think about, although I don’t know important or how cool it’s for one to keep changing their wallet address.

Privacy of the owner, security of the wallet, safety of the fund are most important things to care about, whereas things such as "How cool" is not important, if not saying it is very dangerous to chase something cool that might possible costs your privacy, wallet security or fund safety.

The advice is always
"Don't reuse your Bitcoin address".
So if it is for privacy, it's always right to change your Bitcoin addresses as when you move your bitcoin in one transaction, if it is not a transaction of all coins you have to a new address (for example of the receiver), the remaining coins will be transacted to a Changed address.

What is the "Change" address on bitcoin wallet ? read to know !
[Guideline] For sending BTC transactions

Avoid reusing wallets
Don't send your Bitcoin change to the same address you use for sending bitcoins.

For instance, if I have some certain amount stored in an electrum wallet address and after 4 years I should be able to move it out to a hardware wallet address.

I want to know, does this improve and enhance our security level for our investment?

If there are big upgrades on Bitcoin protocol, and there are security reasons or benefits you can achieve with new address type, it can be big reason for you to move your coins into a new wallet. It happened when people moved their coins from Legacy wallets to Segwit or Taproot wallets recent years.

[Peanutswar]

Basically all you need is to diversify your assets. You have an assets that will be use to sleep your funds like waiting in a long term basis such as you didnt even flinch to move any coins is I/we recommend to use a hardware wallet, now if you think you must need to have an active transactions such as buying other coins, p2p and more ideal to have a hot wallet so these two kind of wallet all basically you need now its up to you if you still wanted to create another wallet but sometimes people getting lazy and tired to maintain their wallet so the reason why diversify your assets like you have mentioned on your post prevent hackers or other incidents this will prevent you to lose most of the coins do you have at least just partial.

[Dave1]

I have been thinking about this lately and I want to share it as it becomes a something think about, although I don’t know important or how cool it’s for one to keep changing their wallet address. For instance, if I have some certain amount stored in an electrum wallet address and after 4 years I should be able to move it out to a hardware wallet address.

Why not start with the hardware wallet specially if you are going to store a lot of Bitcoin and going to hold it for many years? Electrum is good, but for me it's used for daily or weekly transaction and should not be for long store.

I want to know, does this improve and enhance our security level for our investment? Because nowadays the manner at which people are getting fished or hacked is becoming increasingly alarming which to me I felt it would be that better to either moved out our assets from wallet A to wallet B just to make sure our investment wouldn’t be a major target for others.

Your opinion are welcomed.

Security? yes for hardware wallet but for sure you have heard about the Coldcard incident so pick a good hardware wallet. As for changing wallet address, it's more of a privacy because if you keep on re-using that same address sooner or later someone might want to track you personally and do a $5 wrench attack.

[Ethan151]

I don't think changing a wallet address every 3–8 years should be treated as a security rule. It can be useful for privacy, especially when an address has been used repeatedly, but it does not automatically make the funds more secure.
If the seed phrase or private key has been compromised, simply generating a new address from the same wallet will not solve the problem. In that situation, the important step is to move the funds to a completely secure wallet with a new seed.
For long-term holders, I think the priority should be protecting the seed phrase, using a properly secured wallet, keeping reliable backups, and avoiding unnecessary transactions. Address changes should mainly be considered from a privacy perspective rather than as a fixed 3–8 year security routine.

[Coyster]

Address reuse is bad for privacy. Good wallets allow you to generate new addresses for every transaction if you wish to do so, in order for you to control your UTXO's more efficiently.

That said, just moving all your funds from one wallet to another after a specific period of time is very bad for privacy, because anybody can obviously follow the trail of your transactions through the blockchain. Even if you must do that (which i think is unnecessary), you'd have to break the link by using a mixer or coinjoin, so your funds in your new address cannot be traced back to the previous one.

[Somegory]

Some part of me is thinking that this topic comes from a place that ColdCard fear has built, OP I want you to listen to me on this,  I am in the same shoe as you and I believe there is something better than you can do.

If you have a lot of Bitcoin for example, 10 BTC, it's fine to buy two hardware wallets like Trezor and another that's open source and airgapped them split the Bitcoins between the wallets.

The most important thing I want you to do is add extra layer of security in your recovery seed, I want you to do more research on Passphrase, how this works is hiding your real wallet from bad actors.

Let's say they have access to your recovery seed they will get an empty wallet because your real wallet is protectedy Passphrase, they will need to get your Passphrase to get to your Bitcoin.

[MisFoxie]

I want to know, does this improve and enhance our security level for our investment?

Yes if your hardware wallet is genuine then it will definitely enhance the security level of your investment. If you are using electrum wallet as an air gapped then there should be no problem even if you do not change your wallet.

people are getting fished or hacked is becoming increasingly alarming which to me I felt it would be that better to either moved out our assets from wallet A to wallet B just to make sure our investment wouldn’t be a major target for others.

I want to clarify one thing if someone knows your wallet address they will not be able to know your device or email or other means through which you can be identified. That means we can say that no one will be able to target you through the address. Therefore if your device is safe there is no need to change your address. But if you think your phone has been infected by malware on in some other way then it is very important to change the address and device.

[promise444c5]

No it doesn’t change anything in-term of security.. you are basically switching from an old version to a new version  when you transfer your bitcoins every 4 years..

 It’s simple, in 4 years from now definitely the wallet you’re using will have new versions and there’s possibility to that the new version also have vulnerabilities even though updates fix vulnerabilities too.. it depends on how serious it is and you may even be safer with the old.

Hence, there’s high chance of losing your bitcoin to a known vulnerability compared to the new.. But,  unless there’s a vulnerability that can compromise your keys directly , you’ll always be safe with a cold storage.

[GeorgeJohn]

I want to know, does this improve and enhance our security level for our investment? Because nowadays the manner at which people are getting fished or hacked is becoming increasingly alarming which to me I felt it would be that better to either moved out our assets from wallet A to wallet B just to make sure our investment wouldn’t be a major target for others.

Most of the replies have given you a perfect answers..but i just also let you know that there's no need of moving your asset from one address to another...Even the address you're moving to maybe the new versions of the wallet, despite that new version may have vulnerability fixes, which the old version doesn't have it, but that does not mean that you will be moving asset from one place to other, I will also prefer for you to keep your asset to the one you have been holding it for long, provided that your seed phrase haven't been expose, it's not easier as we may think for hackers to hack our hardware wallet..Majorly hackers concentrate more in exchange..

[348Judah]

Do we have to wait till 3 to 4 years before we could decide it to change our wallet address, especially when we think there is a kind of loophole with the wallet we are used in and we are suspecting for not having 100% protection through the wallet, we may try to change it to another, if we also see that the wallet has gain much exposure online and you are having encounter with unsolicited dust transactions on it, then it is due for a change because it could be vulnerable to an attack, some of us would have used our SIM wallet address on public platforms in the past.

[tabas]

IMHO, if that's going to give you a peace of mind then do it. But I think what we must focus with is on how our internet activities are being done. Because I've seen those who have been holding for so long and yet, still fall to these attacks due to panic and worrying that much. We know ourselves better and no matter how we think secured we are but if what we do is against to the usual security measure of keeping our wallets/bitcoins safe then we'll still fall for these phishing attacks. In my experience, I've keep it for so long and more than 5 years and nothing has happened although it's different now due to this cold card issue and it's understandable that we're finding more ways to be secured to these possible bugs. I think it's nice that we've got this in our minds and it made us more aware of potential threats.

[tbct_mt2]

Do we have to wait till 3 to 4 years before we could decide it to change our wallet address, especially when we think there is a kind of loophole with the wallet we are used in and we are suspecting for not having 100% protection through the wallet, we may try to change it to another, if we also see that the wallet has gain much exposure online and you are having encounter with unsolicited dust transactions on it, then it is due for a change because it could be vulnerable to an attack, some of us would have used our SIM wallet address on public platforms in the past.

In security, it's a bad advice.

It's bad similarly to how some services require users to change their account passwords after 6 months for example. It does not improve security for user accounts as secure or not secure, it depends on how they generate strong passwords for their accounts, activate and use 2FA for their accounts and related emails.

If changing password regularly like 6 months while passwords (both old and new) are weak, it does not help anything considerably.

If a wallet is bad, and you know it, it's time to move your bitcoins immediately to a new and better wallet.

[The Cryptovator]

I want to know, does this improve and enhance our security level for our investment? Because nowadays the manner at which people are getting fished or hacked is becoming increasingly alarming which to me I felt it would be that better to either moved out our assets from wallet A to wallet B just to make sure our investment wouldn’t be a major target for others.

Why should it change every 3-8 years? Why not for each transaction? Remember, you must know that just changing addresses doesn’t help you to protect your wallet unless you protect your seed and wallet credentials. Changing addresses enhances your privacy and security as well. Because attackers target an address first and then move on.

However, I will advise you to change your address for each transaction. And you must use an open-source hardware wallet to secure your funds. Securing your funds doesn’t depend on any single fact. Everything is related to each other; if your wallet seed is compromised, then it doesn’t matter what address you have been using.