Topic: Still not really understanding the wallet (Read 1433 times)

bump

Do you consolidate them to one wallet by manually sending coins to a "savings" address or addresses?

You should keep several encrypted backups of any wallet that has a balance.

yes.

Okay, but if there have been any receiving coins on the wallet.dat that is going to be copied over, will those coins be lost when the saved wallet.dat is copied over it?

Copying.


At the moment, you have to do everything manually, including managing and protecting wallets. Bitcoin has for a reason the version number 0.3.22.

It just does not have all features yet. There are so many noobs now because of the media attention, but the software is still far from finished. At least it is stable and works properly.

Okay, but how do you "get wallet.dat1 to the bitcoin client"?

You can just remember an accound number of the wallet.dat1 and then send savings to it.

You only have to get wallet.dat1 to the bitcoin client, when you want to spend the coins from the savings wallet.

That is correct. ^_^

Ahhh ok starting to get it I think. Thanks for the replies everyone. So...If i have chosen a wallet to be the "savings" wallet, any receiving addresses unique to that wallet could qualify as the "savings address". Is this correct?

If you want to create a savings wallet it is better to do it offline.  After you get a few new addresses in your savings wallet, note them down.  Then encrypt with your favorite tool.  Best not to use Windows because it is not free and closed source.  Once you boot with your normal wallet send the coins to your saving addresses.  Wallets don't have to be online to receive.

Bitcoin client can handle only one wallet at the same time, and it must me named wallet.dat . You can use another computer (it can be virtual) for running Bitcoin with the savings wallet.

In order to keep the wallet file encrypted while Bitcoin is running, you can use transparent encryption, for example, put /roaming/bitcoin folder in a Truecrypt container. Or, encrypt the whole hard drive :-)

It needs to be called wallet.dat. It cannot be encrypted. 

Hello!

I have been following bitcoin for a few weeks now and consider myself pretty good with computers but I still seem to be confused about the mechanics of the wallet. If someone could help clarify I would really appreciate it!

So... I have my /roaming/bitcoin folder open and I see the wallet.dat file. Now I create a new folder on the c drive and just call it Bitcoin and move the wallet.dat to there. I close bitcoin and reopen it and there is a new wallet.dat file in the /roaming/bitcoin folder. We'll call that wallet.dat1 and the one moved to the c:\bitcoin folder wallet.dat2. So wallet.dat1 is the new wallet and wallet.dat2 is the backup? So what if I wanted to make wallet.dat2 my "savings" wallet, and transfer bitcoins from wallet.dat1 to wallet.dat2? How do I do that? Can I rename wallet.dat2 to something like Walletsavings.dat and replace it into the /roaming/bitcoin folder and have everything work the same or does it have to be renamed back to wallet.dat and overwrite the other one?? And I'm taking it that every instance of wallet.dat needs to be encrypted, including the one in /roaming/bitcoin? Am I just needlessly confusing myself? Normally I would just screw around with everything but I dont want to suddenly end up with 0 bitcoins accidently! Thanks for any guidance!