Address reuse
Also · Static address
Address reuse is receiving several payments on the same Bitcoin address. It lets anyone add up your balance and link your counterparties, and it is the easiest privacy mistake to avoid.
A Bitcoin address is public and permanent. Receive 10 payments on the same one and anyone with a block explorer sees the total, the dates, and the addresses that paid you. Each payer learns about the others. Chain analysis gets a ready-made cluster for free.
Wallets have derived a fresh address for every receipt since the hierarchical deterministic standards of 2012, so reuse today is mostly a habit, a donation address pasted on a page, a QR code printed once. The fix is to treat an address like an invoice number, used once. Where a static identifier is really needed, Silent Payments on-chain and BOLT12 offers or LNURL on Lightning provide 1 without the leak.
In French · Réutilisation d’adresse