From what I understand change addresses are automatically generated when you use sendtoaddress but what I don't understand is why these change addresses don't become automatically associated with the sending account. What is the reason for this?
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Bitcoin Core's wallet interprets Bitcoin transactions as payments. A payment is sending money from one entity to another, and is independent from what exact coins were sent and how much change was given back.
When you have a transaction which spends a coin of yours A, and sends it to addresses X and Y, with X being an address of yours, the payment is assumed to have amount A - (value of coin sent to X), and to be going to Y.
X is not associated with an account because the software does not expect payments to it, only a single transaction output which is a low-level detail of how one particular payment occurred.
That said, because of this, and various other confusing parts of the accounts system and their inability to be used in a best practices way, they are deprecated and will be reduced to just address labels in a future version.
Pieter Wuille
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noneor""– Wizard Of Ozzie Aug 12 '15 at 09:16