Topic: What is my bitcoin address? (Read 829 times)

If you are not concerned about privacy with the person who is paying you then you can give them the xpub key (displayed as the master pub key in electrum) which would allow anyone to calculate the addresses associated with your electrum seed and they can simply send bitcoin to the "next" address associated with your xpub key.

The downsides to this would include the fact that this person would now be able to view every transaction that is done in your electrum wallet, as well as the fact that if you give an address to someone else to pay to and they do not pay nearly instantly then confusion could be caused if two payments are sent to one of your addresses.

Another alternative would include you giving a large number (say 10) of the addresses to your paying party that they can send bitcoin to and you could simply label those addresses as addresses that you are expecting payments to in the future. A downside to this is that this would somewhat interfere with the "receive" tab in electrum, however this is not a tab I recommend using personally.

Also, as mentioned  above, you can have the paying party pay tot he same address multiple times, and funds will automatically "appear" when you receive funds to an already used address. The primary downside to this is that both you and the paying party would loose privacy if you did this.

It can be any of your address.

Okay.  When receiving... it could be any of them right?  Whether never used or under change where its used once?

On 2.x you can choose any address from the addresses tab. On 1.9.x it's the receiving tab. These are all your addresses.


Using a different address per transaction is recommended for privacy reasons. But you can reuse addresses. Addresses don't stop working just because you've used them in the past.

There is no advantage to consolidating all bitcoins in one address.

You can use any address you have ever used in the current wallet or request a new address from Electrum and then always just use that one. Every receiving address and change address used and generated in the future are valid forever for that wallet's seed. Make sure you keep your seed backed up and safe. In a while if you are active using BTC you will have tens, hundreds or even thousands of valid receiving addresses.

I used bitcoin many times to send and receive.  However each time i receive, i believe i gave the site a different btc address.  I use Electrum.  Can someone tell me what is the receiving address i should give a site when they ask for my bitcoin address to receive btc in the future?  I believe they probably want to send btc only to that address and dont want to ask me for btc address each time.


In Receiving and Used... i see 3 btc address that was used twice.  I see 5 btc address that hasn't been used.  I see under Change... 4 btc address and one of them has been used once and this address currently holds my btc.  So which btc address should i give?  Also i notice in many users here... they post their btc address in their profile.  So i could choose any of these btc addresses available?  So i could have 10btc at one address and 5 btc in another address in electrum?  Or its best to keep it all in one address?


Thank you.