I restored my entire hard drive image from a week-old backup to a new hard drive including wallet.dat (no activity during the week on wallet.dat).
If I now generate a new receiving address from the wallet and receive funds on that address
After all of this, I encrypted my wallet.dat. Does encrypting change replace all addresses from the un-encrypted wallet with new addresses?
When you encrypt your wallet file, it is a hindrance to access of your wallet private key. It does not change anything inside that wallet, just block the access to wallet private key.
You can test it by
- Using a same private key to import two different wallet files: one is encrypted and one is not encrypted.
- Opening two wallet files, with passphrase and no passphrase, you will see same receiving addresses.
It's same when you use mnemonic seed on other wallets like Electrum.
Warning on Bitcoin Core when you encrypt your wallet
If you encrypt your wallet and lose your passphrase, you will LOSE ALL OF YOUR BITCOINS!
Are you sure you wish to encrypt your wallet?