Topic: newbie-questions regarding blockchain, wallet and fees (Read 556 times)

The wallet will be at ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat - copy that to back it up.. and copy it each time you make transactions as that wallet can spawn ~100 new addresses at random times invalidating previous wallets.

You can see a list of existing addresses and balance with
bitcoind listallreceivedaddress 0 true

Try
bitcoind getinfo
if it shows connections and the blocks are not increasing then you're likely up to date.. or search online for the total current blocks in BTC.

Transaction fees go to miners for their including your payments in the new blocks they create. Currently a lot of miners will not insist on fees being paid but might well prefer people who do pay something nominal.

There are currently ~286000 blocks. Regardless of your connection or your machine, this will take a few days to download as the Bitcoin protocol isn't made for efficient distribution of large amounts of data. There's a bootstrap torrent you can find on this forum to download a large part of the blockchain using bittorrent, which should be a lot faster.

Alternatively, there are light clients such as Multibit that don't need to download the entire blockchain. They are ready-to-use much much faster.

A wallet is automatically created upon first startup.

The fee goes to the miners that add new blocks to the blockchain. The FAQ will have more info on mining.

Hi,

I'm a newbie to bitcoin and so I read all the newbie-texts on bitcoin.org and some parts of the FAQ to get an idia whats bitcoins are about.
Then I installed bitcoind (on Debian wheezy). So far, no problem. But I now have three questions and can't find the answers to them in FAQ (maybe I'm looking wrong):

1. I the texts there was said that it would take a long time to download the blockchain the first time, more than six hours. Despite using a lame old hardware with a really crappy Internet-connection, the download stopped after about half an hour with 67714 blocks. Can this be right? What ist the number which should stand there?

2. After starting bitcoind from the texts I read, I would suspect that the next step is to create me a wallet. But when I look at the commands bitcoind is accepting, something like "create-wallet" is not to be found. With what command can I create a new wallet?

3. In the FAQ I found that there are small fees to the transactions. That sounded plausible. My question ist: Who is deciding to whome this fee will go? Or, to make the question a bit more provocative: What do I have to do to make the fees from other transaction go to me? 

Thanks for any answer (or link to the right part of the FAQ if I have missed the part where my answers are to be found)

Tom.