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I see a lot of scams listing bitcoin addresses to pay money into, and I'm wondering how feasible it is to block some instances of spam based on these addresses, but I confess to having only a passing knowledge of Bitcoin.

Can anyone shine light on how difficult it is to create new bitcoin addresses, and how practical it is to do and manage this programatically on a large scale.

(At the risk of going off topic, if anyone knows of an updated list of "bad" actors addresses which I can incorporate, I would be greatful for the pointer, but this is very much secondary to my main question of "how viable is such a list)

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    Addresses are easily generated, it's not like scams are going to have a certain signature that differentiates them from the rest and they can always just get a new one. You could use bitcoinwhoswho.com. They have lookups and an API where you can get scam reports on an address. Not sure if they would share their list, probably not, but you can query an address each time you come across one
    – MC10
    Mar 19, 2019 at 20:07
  • Thank you for this - If you make it an answer and (as per the Wikipedia page) mention that an address is " a single-use token", I will accept it.
    – davidgo
    Mar 19, 2019 at 20:17
  • I believe an address can be reused, it's just not recommended for privacy reasons. The wording on that phrase is weird, it's definitely not strictly a "single-use token". How else would people leave up Bitcoin donation addresses? More on that here: bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67416/…
    – MC10
    Mar 19, 2019 at 21:05

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It's absolutely trivial to generate billions of addresses if you want to. It's only slightly more than trivial to check all of these addresses to see if a payment has been received by any of them.

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A bitcoin address is a single-use token, one can use this bitcoin address to transfer bitcoins to other addresses. A unique address should be used for every transaction.

You can also create bitcoin address offline, you don't need to register on the bitcoin network. While creating a bitcoin address, use copy and paste on computer clipboard or wherever possible as bitcoin addresses are case sensitive and exact.

Additionally, you can create a multi-signature address that requires multiple private keys. The actual requirement really needs to be satisfied because once you create the address, the requirement can not be changed without generating a new address.

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In summary: while not impossible, that the spam you receive would be filterable through bitcoin address, (there are situations, when recurring bitcoin addresses indeed do exist see when bellow), it is unlikely to work and especially VERY UNLIKELY to be the case with scammers.

It is trivial to create any new btc address and especially the scammers would use single-use addresses only. For completeness sake though it is not true, that bitcoin addresses are ALWAYS single-use in general. It is both possible to use any single address as many time as you wish and also it is used in some instances in that way in practice. It just is not recommended to be used in such a manner, because it is than much easier to follow transactions and net worth of the user ... ie breaking privacy of his financial decisions.

explanation: On the other people using bitcoin not always want to have privacy, they may actually prefer transparency for others (it would be analogical to open and transparent bank account) .. or do not care, and use single btc address over and over.

Either way, The bitcoin network and application using it are designed in such a way, that using bitcoin address as something unique worth blocking is meaningless.

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  • Why is actually my answer voted down?
    – Petr Reo Skůpa
    Oct 24, 2019 at 14:06

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