Address reuse for business

Question

The consensus is that address reuse is bad and should not be done. Bitcoin wiki even argues it hurts yourself and those who will own the bitcoins after you.

However, unless I am mistaken, most business reuse the same address all the time. They have to, to avoid having to generate a new address every time someone visits their website.

So I am struggling to reconcile this. Is address reuse actually ok? Am I wrong in saying that business reuse addresses? Or are most businesses creating a privacy issue in the block chain?

Answer 1

This is more an issue of willingness. Generally you are right, address re-use is seen as "should not be done" :-) Biggest threat would be, that some bitcoins get "tainted", and loose their value. I leave it to the experts to get this explained. With HD Wallets you can generate enough adresses for your webpage/business usage. Just some coding required...

How many public/private keypairs can a Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets (BIP0032/BIP0044) produce? If I got it right, it should be some 2^31 addresses - probably enough for the majority of business cases.