many different transactions tied to a particular bitcoin address
The sentence refers to the fact that the address can be involved in many different transactions. This is most likely seen with the address working as a receiving address, or destination address. For instance, imagine that you want to have an address posted in your personal website where you receive donations from people. It would be tedious to change it every time you receive a transaction.
As you already mentioned, reusing an address is not usually a good practice, since it could involve some privacy issues. By using a different address each time you perform a payment, you make it harder to link different bitcoin addresses owned by you (however, not impossible). By using always the same address when paying you make way easier for a third party to analyse your behaviour, based on where you are sending bitcoins.
Finally you should not mix up Bitcoin address with wallet. Think in a wallet as a collection of tools that let you manage your Bitcoin address (or addresses), such managing public/private keys to create transactions. What is said to be a bad practice in the Bitcoin wiki is referring to use the same Bitcoin address multiple times. The wallet is a collection of tools, the Bitcoin address will be more like an endpoint.
So the "address" in "many different transactions tied to a particular bitcoin address" really mean bitcoin address, but in the context of bad practice? – Aqqqq – 2017-02-18T19:20:06.457
You should not mix up wallet with address. A bitcoin wallet can hold multiple addresses, actually it usualy does. Bitcoin Core wallet for example creates a new address every time a transaction is performed to get the change returned, if there is change. That is: imagine that you have 2 BTC in address A1 form a single previous transmission, and you want to transfer 1 BTC to address B1. You should send 1 BTC back to yourself, otherwise it will be treated as fees (that is normally done to a new generated address, for example A2). – sr-gi – 2017-02-18T21:09:51.287
So the "address" in this context should be "wallet" instead, am I correct? – Aqqqq – 2017-02-19T14:48:14.817
No, unfortunately you are not, it means Bitcoin address. Think in a wallet as a collection of tools that let you manage your Bitcoin address (or addresses). What is said to be a bad practice in the Bitcoin wiki page you provided is referring to use the same Bitcoin address multiple times. The wallet is a tool, the Bitcoin address will be more like an endpoint. – sr-gi – 2017-02-19T18:17:33.650
Sorry I am confused. What does "many different transactions tied to a particular bitcoin address" really mean if it is not referring to the bad practice involving using the same bitcoin address multiple times? – Aqqqq – 2017-02-19T20:37:22.497
Forget for a moment about the bad practice. Imagine that you can only have a single Bitcoin address. Then, all the transactions in which you will be involve will be tied to that address. Now, if we take into account the "bad practice" consideration, it is not recommended to reuse addresses, but this do not mean that you can't do it. Hence, many different transactions can be tied to a single address. – sr-gi – 2017-02-21T20:55:58.877
Nice! Is that all? – sr-gi – 2017-02-22T08:36:27.643
Yes (for now at least). It was a misunderstanding to begin with. – Aqqqq – 2017-02-22T08:45:40.120
@Aqqqq: If this post answered your question, please accept it, so that the question no longer gets bumped to the frontpage periodically. Otherwise, please update your question to further clarify what information you're looking for. Thanks. – Murch – 2017-05-20T18:45:37.170
@sr_gi: Comments are supposed to be for transient information only. Please edit your post to incorporate the relevant bits from the comments.
– Murch – 2017-05-20T18:47:01.967@Murch Sure, we extended the discussion so much. I've updated the answer. – sr-gi – 2017-05-20T19:03:20.327
@Murch Thanks for the reminding me. I upvoted your answer as well. – Aqqqq – 2017-05-22T16:07:20.370