Topic: Change Addresses (Read 352 times)

#3: no way to turn it off with Bitcoin-QT.  However other clients don't have to act this way, they could put all your change to 1 address if they wanted.

Change addresses are a protection if Quantum computing ever happens.... if it did, you'd want to keep your addresses secret, ie never keep money in an address you've told people

I'm trying to understand change addresses, because I had the following situation happen.  I backed up my wallet and soon after proceeded to have a computer crash.  This wiped my system.  Pulled in the wallet I had backed up, and was missing many address labels I had created between backing up and failing (far less than 100, addresses were still stored in wallet).  Understanding that a wallet had 100 addresses preloaded, I started recreating addresses and matching up transactions I remembered.  I got most of them, and things were ok.  The other day, after learning about change addresses, I wondered if creating new addresses in my wallet would uncover those change addresses.  It appeared that it did.  I have created over 50 test addresses new from my wallet and all of them but one have activity on blockchain.info. 

Here are my questions.

1) Is there a way to view all the change addresses that have been created for me or do I have to keep creating them until I have them all?
2) When I create a new address for receiving in bitcoin-qt, does it randomly pick addresses from the pregenerated pool or proceed in order?  I had one address that I generated that showed no activity, and then the next one did.
3) Is this optional functionality?  Is there a way to turn this on and off?
4) These change addresses all have 0 balance.  Do they get transferred?  How does this all work?