Your wallet can have any number of keypairs, and all of them always work.
I was going to start a thread about this. I received my first bitcoins from a transaction today. Then, the address in my bitcoin ap changed. Is this ok? I had the old one plugged into my slush pool acct.
Thank you in advance to whoever verifies this for me.
Yes, it's fine. The default behavior of the standard client is to change your receiving address with each transaction that you send. Your old addresses remain valid forever, however, so long as the keypairs that relate to them remain in your wallet.dat file. You can safely continue to use the same address for as long as you like, but giving that same address out to too many people undermines the anonimity of the system. A good standard is to give a different address to each friend or family member, but keep a record of which address was given to whom. The client doesn't do this very well, yet. So if you receive a payment from out of the blue, you can tell who sent it by looking at the address that it was sent to.