Topic: Help: The two wallet system - page 2. (Read 2913 times)

Good to meet a fellow SN listener!

From what I understand:

1) You don't have to have Bitcoin running to receive transactions. If you want to send from A to B, you open up Bitcoin with A's wallet, and send it to an address associated with B. If you don't know what that address is, then you will need to open B's wallet, copy it down, close bitcoin, copy A's wallet over, and then send the transactions.

2) The coins are received. To test it out, setup an account at mybitcoin.com, and transfer .01 BTC. Then shut down your bitcoin client, and transfer it to your client's address. Stay away as long as you can, and then bring it back up. As blocks are downloaded, you will see your transaction suddenly appear!

3) The savings wallet should be updated as frequently as you want. No transactions are lost, it will just take time to download the blocks that you are missing. I open/update mine every day because I want to be able to send BTC within a few minutes if I want.

4) Not from what I can tell. The only traffic is the getwork command and the report back. Other than that, it's just your CPU or GPU crunching numbers.

5) Yes, but without the ability for a government to issue more. It's more like vaporizing gold; the material is destroyed forever, until somebody figures out how to sort through all the molecules of the air and extract the gold particles to recombine them. Not an easy task.

Good luck, and glad to have you here!

1) You don’t have to use wallet B if you just want to send it to B if you have B’s address. Check out blockexplorer if you want to see transactions without your client. Don’t forget to backup your wallet every time a transaction is done.

2) Right, all transactions are stored in the blocks, so you never have to be online.

3) You can update it however often you want, it doesn’t matter. If you load your wallet and all the blocks, you’ll have what you have been sent.

5) Yes, excactly. The private keys to your public key addresses are stored in the wallet. Once you lose it, you have no chance to get back your bitcoins.

No, it's easier. You just start up your B "saving" instance once, so it creates a wallet.dat with the private key. Then, you write down your B's receiving address and backup your B wallet, and start your normal bitcoin client again. Whenever you want to save something, just create the transaction to B's receiving address. Then if the transaction is known to the network it's done. You could start your B instance like you describe to see the money you sent do yourself, but there's no need to do so. The transaction is known in the block chain, and is non-revocable. So even if you just start your B instance in 20 years, it would catch your transaction while scanning the new blocks.

Right, there's no need to be online while a transaction is done to be able to receive it.

In your wallet.dat you have your keys, plus 100 new keys. So, you have to update your B wallet every 100 transactions that you do with your B instance. If you just receive money with one of your B wallet's addresses, there's no need to backup your wallet.dat file again.
So, just create your B wallet.dat, write down the receiving address, lock the B wallet.dat in an encrypted container and don't bother with it again until you want to withdraw from your saving account.

Not much. Maybe a few MB per hour?

Yes, it's totally gone, forever! It's like burning a dollar bill and swallowing the ashes ;-)

Hi guys, just got into Bitcoin thanks to GRC's Security-Now podcast.  Quick question that I haven't seen answered on the wiki.

It suggests creating a 2 wallets, one that has all the "savings" and one for the other normal transactions. 

1) If coins are sent from A to B, I need to close BTC, open it up with a B's wallet.dat, wait until payment is received, and then switch it back out correct?

2) What, in general, happens to coins that are sent to an account that is not online?  (From what I understand the blocks will catch you up right?)

3) How often should the "savings" wallet be updated with new blocks?  Sealing it away in an encrypted container can't possibly make it a proper wallet...right? 

4) All these blocks we're all getting, is this taking much bandwidth?

5) As I recall, losing your wallet.dat with any funds inside means those BTCs are gone forever - is this equivalent to burning a dollar bill or melting a penny?