Topic: Electrum (Read 178 times)

It is obvious that OP is sending / receiving coins from his wallet, and since Electrum show new receiving address for each transaction he is see coins in different addresses. In case of sending coins from wallet, coins will be spread even more to different addresses, in this case to change addresses. This is something what confuses users who use HD wallets for first time, but what is most important is final balance of the wallet.

User can always use only one receiving address, and if Electrum did not change that option, using of change addresses can be disabled. In that case all coins will always be in one address.

I agree with Pmalek but wanted to give you some more info...

There are 2 reasons not to re-use addresses. The first one has been discussed by Pmalek. The second one is that as soon as you spend unspent output funding an address, you need to broadcast the public key in the spending transaction. As long as you don't spend any unspent outputs funding an address, nobody knows your public key... Eventough it's not that important, it adds an extra layer of security.

A second thing is that i wanted to point out that a lot of these "problems" of funds being spread over different addresses come from a common misconception: your funds is NOT stored in your wallet. Your wallet contains an xprv from which private keys are derived (this is only the case for HD wallets, non-HD wallets do not contain an xprv, but merely a bunch of private keys). A public key can be derived from your private key, and if the public key is hashed you'll see your address.
Next to this, your wallet might contain some meta info (like labels you added to an address or transaction) and it might keep track of the unspent outputs funding the addresses generated by hashing the public keys belonging to the private keys created by your wallet... Hower, this is merely a caching function, by rescanning the blockchain anybody could find those unspent outputs...
Your funds are not stored in your wallet, they're merely the sum of the output value(s) of one or more of the outputs funding (an) address(es) whose private key(s) you own, that are generated by transactions that are stored on the decentralised blockchain.

So, if you disregard the two main reasons not to re-use your addresses, from a financial AND practical point of view it doesn't really matter if there are 1000 unspent outputs funding 1000 addresses monitored by your wallet, or 1000 unspent outputs funding 1 address monitored by your wallet. If you want to spend part of those 1000 unspent outputs, your wallet will combine them untill the output value funding your addresses are greater or equal to the value with which you want to fund the receiving address + the mining fee... It required no effort from your side, your wallet will take care of keeping track of everything.

Because it is recommended never to reuse the same address. You should use a new address for every transaction. That makes it harder to connect the address to the person using it.

Your funds are not spread across different addresses. If you request funds to be sent to Address A that is where they will be. See answer above why you shouldn't reuse addresses. 20 new addresses is the standard when creating a new wallet. Every time you use an address a new one will be created and added to the list. You can have 100s of addresses on that list, nothing to worry about.

i just transferred all of my funds to electrum now, i have some few question about the wallet, why do electrum kept changing my receiving address instead of having a single address, and why do i have 20+ address in the addresses tab, with my funds spread in a different address.


EDIT: Thanks for the answers