Re-using addresses to me is a good feature of bitcoin. Why are programs trying to stop that? When you have a donation address, a payment address, an address just associated with your company you would want people to know that address. Let the user make up their mind and do what they want instead of the program, right? Almot %90 of the users here paste their personal bitcoin address in their signature. It is more of a common practice to re-use addresses then anything and when a program or someone tries to just change that, questions will be asked....hence an entire thread.
Address reuse is privacy pollution.
And that should up to the user to do with what he/she wants to do with his/her privacy. Why would other people care what I do?
Because it's not expected of the user to know how to optimize their own privacy. It's up to us to set sane defaults and educate users about what they sacrifice by deviating from that.
Unfortunately, Bitcoin privacy is pretty bad and reusing addresses pretty much completely deanonamizes you. Every one you interact with can see you r entire history and balance. It's pretty atrocious.
Not only that, but by doing that you damage the privacy of everyone that interacts with you. It's in everyone's best interest to discourage address reuse, especially when the software uses deterministic wallets and backups are not an issue
Here's the rub. Some user's want to be able to let everyone see their account history for proof of payments, account balances, etc. I'm currently taking donation for a website, and want the users to see how much I have been receiving so they can stop donating when the balance is where it is supposed to be. Even this forum does the same thing. They use the same address over and over again so people can see what is going on. If that's what its intent is for, then it is not a privacy issue. There are several situations where I would want to use the same receive address. If someone making a donation realizes the address they are sending to has been used over and over, then that address history is viewable by all. At that point, let the user make the decision on what they want to to. Are you trying to implement new rules into bitcoin or just your client? Will you continue to keep the ability for the user to keep using the same receive address or remove that function entirely. As I said before, I'm all for letting the user make the decision (be it a bad one or not) and not force them down a path they don't want to go because of the program. If that happens with me, I'll just find an alternative. Everyone is so hooked on having a receive for everything that receive address list starts to grow like wild file. If that's not pollution, I don't know what is. The bottom line, some people are fully aware of what they are doing and just want to use a receive address they used before. This is an obvious advanced bitcoin client here, please don't turn around and say you are looking out for the new bitcoin users and their practices. If I want to use another address, I'll pick one. I can see the very paranoid, overly security conscious people worried about this, but their also the ones that won't even use online banking because they're afraid their account will get hacked. Being overly paranoid and secretive puts you into certain positions you have to deal with, and if you are hiding something that's a whole new story.