The alternative is providing the sender address so that their system can identify who paid and for how much, which results in you having to identify yourself before each and every transaction (probably through a user account setting or some other form you have to fill out). This is an extra and cumbersome step so it creates an incentive to maintain a singular and constant BTC address of your own.
The rationale behind creating a new BTC recipient address for every transaction is that it doesn't matter who the sender is.
It simply just lets you know who paid you, and avoid exposing your entire revenue to everybody else to view. Additionally it makes sure that your clients aren't connected by their payments, it keeps their pseudo-anonymity.
First and foremost is simplicity for the recipient: if wallet X contains the desired number of bitcoins, the sender paid. Unambiguously. Otherwise it's difficult to tell who sent what, since you might be sending any number of pieces of coins that all make up "your" transaction, which is complex / nigh-impossible to solve without other ways of verifying (such as including a message in the transaction). This is made even more complex if you receive many transactions from many people with a single address.
Second is anonymity. If you reuse "your" wallet and it's ever connected to you, so is every transaction out of it, forever. If you value the anonymity side of Bitcoin, it's very important, but not sufficient. If you don't care about anonymity, the only other downside is that someone who gets your private key can wait until your wallet is bigger before stealing the bitcoins. If you constantly change addresses, the old private key is essentially worthless as soon as you make any transaction. Honestly that's pretty unlikely, and if they have your private key it's game over anyway, they can steal it all at any time they want.
Would you want the balance of your bank account and its entire transaction history to be publicly accessible? That's the equivalent of only using one address for everything. When you use a separate address for each transaction, it becomes much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to link the addresses to established entities. And even if you can, the additional knowledge gained is limited.
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Can you please explain why one should use a new address each time? I keep hearing it but am not clear on why this is recommended.
The alternative is providing the sender address so that their system can identify who paid and for how much, which results in you having to identify yourself before each and every transaction (probably through a user account setting or some other form you have to fill out). This is an extra and cumbersome step so it creates an incentive to maintain a singular and constant BTC address of your own.
The rationale behind creating a new BTC recipient address for every transaction is that it doesn't matter who the sender is.
It simply just lets you know who paid you, and avoid exposing your entire revenue to everybody else to view. Additionally it makes sure that your clients aren't connected by their payments, it keeps their pseudo-anonymity.
Two major reasons, depends on who's telling.
First and foremost is simplicity for the recipient: if wallet X contains the desired number of bitcoins, the sender paid. Unambiguously. Otherwise it's difficult to tell who sent what, since you might be sending any number of pieces of coins that all make up "your" transaction, which is complex / nigh-impossible to solve without other ways of verifying (such as including a message in the transaction). This is made even more complex if you receive many transactions from many people with a single address.
Second is anonymity. If you reuse "your" wallet and it's ever connected to you, so is every transaction out of it, forever. If you value the anonymity side of Bitcoin, it's very important, but not sufficient. If you don't care about anonymity, the only other downside is that someone who gets your private key can wait until your wallet is bigger before stealing the bitcoins. If you constantly change addresses, the old private key is essentially worthless as soon as you make any transaction. Honestly that's pretty unlikely, and if they have your private key it's game over anyway, they can steal it all at any time they want.
Would you want the balance of your bank account and its entire transaction history to be publicly accessible? That's the equivalent of only using one address for everything. When you use a separate address for each transaction, it becomes much more difficult (and in many cases impossible) to link the addresses to established entities. And even if you can, the additional knowledge gained is limited.