Topic: How do wallets work? -- help the newbie with a multiple backups of diff. wallets (Read 2916 times)

yeah. That is something I'd like to know too. How can I get the list of those hundred addresses so I can send to them without having to go to my airgapped machine opening my client and generate/copy/paste each address one at a time to a notepad file?

are the pre loaded 100 addresses in 0.3.23 Windows version?  these are hidden, right?  as in not seen in address book?

I'd just like to clarify this: There was NOT a bug. This happened before the 100 address pool code was added to the standard bitcoin software.

so how do you organize all these extra wallets?

heheee... thanks!  

Thank goodness I AM NOT HUMAN!

Grrrrrr.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-hose_cryptanalysis

hmm... rubberhose?  don't get it... sorry.

Now tell me where you live and the address of the closest hardware store for me to buy some rubberhose

Wow, this worked!  Thank you.  I made a new wallet offline.  That gave me an address. I put it on a txt file on my pendrive, and transferred on another computer everything there!

And I checked block explorer, and the 3 sends to that one address show up, showing the total amount. 

Thanks!

Now that is my VAULT... i used ZIP to encrypt the offline wallet using AES 256 with a 20 character sentence password, and uploaded it to my gmail, and dropbox. 

Yes.

There's really no need to run anything. Once you know the address(es) for the wallet, you can transfer to them. You can get the balance using block explorer.

If I delete the backups, and in the future someone sends money to one of those accounts because I emailed them that particular address "for fun, testing purposes" or whatever, I guess those funds will be lost for ever.

Also, I noticed that when I go to view the list of addresses I see a different number in each of the backups. And some of the addresses are not in my address book even though they are ones I received BTC with (I can see them on the main screen of bitcoin.exe)

Why is that? 

Thank you for all your answers too.  I am honestly still shaking from what is going on with Mt Gox.  I had 10 btc there, most of the rest was transfered out and backed-up (multiple times  ) 

I haven't consolidated things, yet.  But once I do, I will tell you how it went.

All the clear, and simple explanations helped me a lot here.  Thanks.

I've been through as many of the backup and security threads as I could find and I still have a couple of questions:

1) Is it possible to create a valid wallet while offline, on an air-gapped computer that has never been and will never be connected to the internet?

2) If so, can bitcoin be run in offline mode to monitor your savings by downloading the blocks on another system and tranferring to the air-gapped one? I understand you need to be online to spend, but I'm thinking of a savings account here.

Thank you this info has been very helpful!

They're not even a whole thing, more like a quantity, like water being poured to and from buckets.

In fact, the word bitcoin is misleading itself. It suggests there is a virtual coin, like a file or record with a sequence of bytes, that can be stored somewhere. The wallet concept also suggest that there is such a byte sequence.
In reality however a bitcoin is even more virtual than this. It is simply the outcome of a sequence of calculations stored in a distributed database (the block chain).

Wallets are more like keychains than real wallets, the money isn't stored in them they just give you the means to use it.



It's practicly free to create new safes and keys, the client actually creates new ones automaticly somtimes; the safes are kept in the blockchain and the keys on the wallet.dat.  The issue with having multiple copies of a single wallet each copied in different points in time is that you risk the older copies not having some of the newer keys, and without those keys you can't get to the money in the safes those keys open; if you loose a key and don't got any copies of that key the money stays locked forever (it's actually quite hard to guess the right key for a given safe, the number of possible shapes is absurdly high)

Thanks DamienBlack and aeroSpike!

I kinda thought that is how it all works, but I was a bit confused, and nervous.  I will do as you instructed above, but I will wait one more day, just to see if anyone else chimes in with any other good ideas with regards to this.

I suggest you create a new wallet, copy its default address, and close it and back it up in a safe place. Now run your Bitcoin client with your backup wallets one by one with the -rescan option as DamianBlack suggested. Wait until the block chain scan has finished and transfer the full balance to your new wallet. Now close the bitcoin client, open your next backed up wallet and do the same. Repeat for all your backups. Start the bitcoin client with your newly created wallet and wait for all your transfers to arrive and confirm. Now you have a single wallet with all your bitcoins and all your backups can be safely deleted.

When you load up the backups of different wallets, I recommend running bitcoin with the -rescan option. This will tell bitcoin to ignore how much the wallet "remembers" having and recheck how much it actually has. This way, you don't even have to worry about any of the issues you bring up.

To use the rescan option in windows, alter the shortcut to have -rescan at the end, or open up the command prompt and run the .exe with -rescan at the end.

The problem with the person you mention has nothing to do with the fact that the the coin "had no where to come back to". What happened is that he added a new address to his wallet, and sent the money to that new address. But he didn't back up a file that contained that new key and deleted the new wallet. So he lost the key forever. As long as you send the money to an address you know you have control of, and DO NOT DELETE ANY WALLETS, you should not have a problem consolidating your funds.


Here is what he did:

Made a wallet with one address
Backed up that wallet
Added a new address to the wallet on his hard drive
Sent all the money to that new address
Deleted that wallet on his hard drive
Loaded up his backup that only had the key for the first address not the new address

The main mistake was deleting the wallet. Don't delete any of them, that is the only way to mess up.

EDIT: This wasn't completely his fault, since wallets are suppose to create 100 addresses for you to use, so the second address should have been in the backup, but there was a bug. Still, it would have never have happened if he didn't delete the wallet.