I am new to this. I have created two new wallet addresses (labeled init and init2). However, when I click "View > Show Addresses," I found a lot of addresses.
Why?
What do receiving and change mean on the Type column?
Can somebody help?
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See github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0044.mediawiki– pinheadCommented Jun 18, 2020 at 15:02
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2 Answers
Electrum will generate a certain number of addresses in advance. It doesn't really matter since it will always generate the same addresses in the same order thanks to using Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallet, but you can modify the number of addresses generated if you want, it's called the gap I think.
The gap can sometimes matter though if you're using some software like Electrum Personal Server or BTCPay, if you received a payment on an address that is outside of your gap (for example, Electrum only generates 20 addresses and you've got a payment on the 34th), Electrum won't see this payment and it can make you believe it's not there. If it ever happens, relax and augment the gap until you find all your payments.
receiving are the addresses you will use to receive payments, change addresses are automatically used by the wallet when you spend bitcoins to send your change to. In theory nothing prevents you to directly send bitcoins to your change address (I mean those addresses have nothing special from a protocol point of view), but it's pointless and bad practice don't do that.
The addresses tab is hidden by default precisely because new users get confused by all these addresses. They are all a part of your wallet and it is best practice to use a different one for every transaction.
The change addresses are for internal use by the software. When spending bitcoin outputs the whole output has to be spent and any remaining amount sent back to the wallet to a change address. You should only hand out the receiving ones yourself.
If you find all this confusing then just go to view > hide addresses and stick to using the receive tab only.
