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What is a Bitcoin Address?

A Bitcoin address can also be referred to as a public key. It's an address where you can receive amounts of bitcoin as a payment or transaction from someone else.

A Bitcoin address, or simply address, is an identifier of 26-35 alphanumeric characters, beginning with the number 1 that represents a public key hash to be used in an output to create a Bitcoin payment. 

Bitcoin currently utilizes an address format delineated with the prefix number 1. e.g: 1BvBMSEYstWetqTFn5Au4m4GFg7xJaNVN2.

Privacy concerns

If a Bitcoin user receives all of their payments into a single Bitcoin address it becomes very easy for anyone to discover how much money they have and what they are doing with that money. To protect user privacy, Address reuse is discouraged. This idea is part of the original plan for user protections in Bitcoin and is mentioned in Section 10: Privacy of the Bitcoin Whitepaper where it is stated:

As an additional firewall, a new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner.

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