Topic: bitcoin-qt: how to check my passphrase without transferring money (Read 5662 times)

And that's not indication enough?

Regardless every time you try to send it will ask for your passphrase. If your wallet was not encrypted it wouldn't ask. You can then cancel at that point. Or sign a message to test the process completely, as was mentioned.

You are correct that anyone could load that wallet.dat and see the same info about the balance and transactions etc.

Do you see the lock symbol in the lower right corner?

Ah, cool, many thanks for that confirmation.

Well, let's see.  In your copy of bitcoin-qt, do you see an item "unlock the wallet" in the menu?  I don't see that in mine.

That is what is so disconcerting, there is not much indication that the wallet is locked at all.  After encrypting the wallet, I expected that at the very latest on restarting bitcoin-qt I would be prompted for my passphrase.  I was not, which means that someone else could steal my wallet.dat and without even decrypting it load it into bitcoin-qt.

I suppose that the info that bitcoin-qt displays on the wallet without the passphrase is the same info that is publicly available about that wallet.  And I suppose that bitcoin-qt prompts for the passphrase only when absolutely necessary in order to avoid unnecessary exposure to keyboard logging attacks.

Can't you just "unlock the wallet" to test?

(only just started playing around with raw txs again today so haven't done this stuff for a while)

BTW - For anyone that has downloaded the CIYAM Safe I have updated it today due to a JSON issue that was in the "signtx" script (never received a bug report so am guessing no-one else has come across the issue yet).

Older versions used to.

The most recent version does not.

I have the same question as the OP.  I just fired up bitcoin-qt and encrypted my wallet.  I am pretty sure the action succeeded, I see the lock on the lower right hand corner of the dialog. Now without sending any money I would like to trigger bitcoin-qt to prompt me for my passphrase, just as a sanity check.


I have also read elsewhere that bitcoin-qt prompts you for your passphrase when you create a new address, but that is not what I observe.  bitcoin-qt lets me create a new address and it does not ask me for my passphrase.  So is it true or not that bitcoin-qt prompts you for your passphrase when you create a new address?

Also,
- I told bitcoin-qt to use a different data directory, and now when it starts up it automatically loads from the new directory.  Where does it remember that path?
- How can I prevent bitcoin-qt from downloading the blockchain at startup?  In the help I see various startup options for the network, so I assume I could just pass in an invalid value to one of those parameters, in order to break bitcoin-qt's network connection, is that the best way?
- If I want to wipe the slate clean and start again, should I delete just the wallet file, or the entire data directory?  After the blockchain is downloaded, where does that get stored, in wallet.dat?

Many Thanks.

when using "sign message" you are prompted for the password. also if you create a new address.

if you just want to check if you still know it these options are most simple.

It is not the same as leaving it unchanged. The key streetching parameter is recomputed afresh with each passphrase change, and this may be undesirable.

I simply tried to send more coins that the wallet contains in total: I would safely get an error message stating the above after the successfull decryption.

I haven't tried the most recent code, I'm still running the older versions, the code may have changed.

You can't change it to what it currently is?

It's not so convenient because I would not prefer to change current passphase.

Good one (don't know how I missed that).

Also the "change passphrase" option can be used to check your passphrase which is a menu option in bitcoin-qt.

Thanks!

debug window is good for me.

If you are not worried that someone might *observe* your password if it appears on the screen then you could use Help->Debug then go to the Console and issue the RPC command: walletpassphrase 1

If you don't want it to be visible then perhaps try by sending funds to yourself?

You can use pywallet (https://github.com/joric/pywallet), but it sure is not the more practical way to do that
Maybe an rpc command?

Hi!

I have several wallets. I encrypted my wallets.

I would like to check my paraphrases sometimes to ensure that I do not forget it.