So, how do you provide a new address to each person?
I am relatively new to BTC, so forgive me if this is a stupid question. I have tried to search for the answer but haven't found anything that answers this specific query.
As I understand it, there's no way to get Mycelium to generate a new receiving address until the previous one has received funds.
It's not a stupid question, it's a stupid mis-feature of Mycelium. People have asked to have this improved in the past (in this thread I think)
but I don't think the developers saw it as a desirable feature. If I'm trying to split a restaurant bill 5 ways I want to be able to give one address to each of the 5 people. I don't want to have to wait for each person to pay before I am allowed to generate the next address. That's just silly.
You can use a site like
https://dcpos.github.io/bip39/ to generate as many receiving addresses as you like, but it's kind of inconvenient. The site works offline - you can save it to a memory stick and load it on an offline machine (so you don't have to type your seed words on an online machine).
I'll see if I can find the post I'm thinking about, and will update this message if I do.
Edit: maybe this is what I'm thinking of - it appears adding the ability know more than one unused receiving address at a time is "on their list", and has been for nearly 2 years now:
With the latest version, if I have given someone the displayed receiving address how do I get another address for payments before a transaction has been sent to it?
Currently thats not possible - but its on our list!
There will be an option to show multiple unused receiving addresses eventually.
It shouldn't be a problem to receive more than one payment to that same address, since all your old addresses are monitored for payments. There might also be an issue that, since HD wallet addresses are generated sequentially, the wallet scans each address to see if it's empty, and if it is, assumes that it was the last one used and doesn't scan for any new ones (we scan 2 ahead). So there may be an issue where, for example, you give three people an address to send to, each one having a new address, and the first two people don't send anything. Since those addresses will be empty, the wallet will think that it's the end of the used addresses and that there are no payments to any later addresses, and the third person's payment (or any after it) will not show up. Only way to get around that is to scan ahead for even more addresses, and/or limit the amount of empty addresses you can generate. But as I said, there shouldn't be a problem with two people sending to the same address.
Should we manage to implement stealth address payments, this won't be a problem anyway.
When we implement support to generate more receiving addresses, we will of course adjust the lookahead accordingly. At the moment it's 2 for synchronizing and 20 for discovery (like when importing or activating an archived account).