How do I disable automatic address generation for the official bitcoin client?

3

This question was asked before over at bitcointalk.org over here way back in June '11. The answer back then was a resounding no. Is this still the case?

My wallet.dat keeps growing bigger after every transaction since the client keeps generating and adding new bitcoin addresses I never intend to use. I want to stop that from happening.

greatwolf

Posted 2012-05-23T03:02:11.773

Reputation: 580

It's not entirely correct to say that these addresses aren't used; they are used for change created by the transactions you make. Changing this has serious privacy implications. – Pieter Wuille – 2012-05-23T09:43:26.697

Probably most of the wallet size increase is caused by Bitcoin saving copies of all of your transactions there, not because of new keys. – theymos – 2012-05-23T13:45:06.440

Answers

4

The satoshi client still uses a previously unused address each time it needs to send itself change, and there's no option to prevent this.

Obviously since the client is open source you could change it to do whatever you like, or pay somebody with the appropriate skills to do it for you.

Chris Moore

Posted 2012-05-23T03:02:11.773

Reputation: 13 952

Asked: 2012-05-23T03:02:11.773

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Active: 2012-05-23T07:08:10.703