Addresses

Status: Early design exploration

Users need a way to view and manage bitcoin addresses that are generated by their wallet.

Single-use addresses (on-chain)

Historically users had to deal with two types of addresses:

• Receive addresses: Users share a receive address with the person they would like to receive a payment from. For privacy reasons it is a best practice to generate a fresh receive address for each payment.
• Change addresses are reserved for receiving the change output from spending transactions. Many wallet applications do not expose change addresses to their users at all. This implies that a significant amount of people are not familiar with the concept.

Reusable addresses (off-chain)

Through the implementation of the Silent Payments protocol, which was introduced with BIP-352, the task of managing one’s own addresses has become more relevant.

A silent payment address is a static offchain address that is used by the sender to derive a fresh bitcoin address for each payment. Users can create sub-addresses according to their personal needs, e.g. for collecting donations, invoicing clients or their online store.