Crypto glossary
Address reuse
Address reuse means receiving several payments to the same Bitcoin address, which links them publicly and weakens the privacy of both sender and receiver.
The Bitcoin whitepaper already recommended a new key pair for every transaction to keep them from being linked. When an address receives many payments, anyone who learns it belongs to you can see your income, balance and spending, and anyone who paid you can see what others paid. Chain analysis firms use reused addresses as anchors to cluster entire wallets.
HD wallets solved the practical problem by generating a fresh receiving address from the same seed each time, and most modern Bitcoin wallets do so automatically. Address reuse remains common with exchange deposit addresses, donation addresses printed on websites and users who copy the same address for convenience. Silent payments and BOLT12 offers aim to provide a static identifier without on-chain reuse.
Beyond privacy, reuse exposes the address's public key once it has spent from it, which matters for long-term concerns such as a future quantum computer able to derive private keys from public ones. On account-based chains like Ethereum, reusing one address is the default, which is one reason Ethereum activity is easier to trace.
Example
A freelancer uses one Bitcoin address on all invoices; a client looks it up and sees every other payment the freelancer has received over three years, including amounts and dates.