Topic: wallet.dat - count of total addresses (Read 262 times)

Good way to get yourself fucked up messing with a core wallet that isn’t yours just to warn you.
Bitcoin core is the OG official way to create a btc address. The formal way it was meant to be created before exchanges came and took all y’all’s monies because people don’t like to put the work in to run a bitcoin core wallet.

But wtf do I know.

$🖤$

Perhaps I'm mistaken, but the question posted by OP feels a bit like an XY Problem.

Trying to read between the lines and guess at what's actually going on here, MAYBE what OP is actually saying is:

"I've been given the opportunity to purchase 2 wallets.dat files.  I've been told that each of these wallet.dat files contains a different address that has received a significant sum of bitcoins. I've also been told that the reason these wallet.dat files are for sale is that the password has been forgotten and therefore the original owner is no longer able to access the Bitcoins. I'm attempting to use various heuristics to measure for myself the amount of risk that these addresses were artificially added to the wallet without the appropriate private key instead of having been generated by the wallet (with the private key), as a method of determining how much I'm willing to pay for the possibility. One of the things I've noticed is that neither of these wallets has a nice even, pretty number of addresses that might be considered to be a natural breakpoint for a default number of addresses generated when first installed, instead they have 201 and 1001 addresses. I'm curious about what the actual default number of addresses is for freshly installed wallets at various times in the past because I think it might help me understand if I need to be concerned about the fact that these wallets have 201 addresses and 1001 addresses.  Knowing when various changes were made to the default number of addresses, and comparing those dates to the dates of when the transactions were sent to the addresses in question might also help me determine if the story I've been told about these wallets makes any sense at all.  Can someone please share with me the date of when Bitcoin Core began using compressed addresses by default at the time of installation, and what the default quantity of addresses generated at installation have been each time it changed (as well as the dates when those changes happened)?"

That's my best guess. I could be wrong.

I'll just leave these links here, you can check the dates and the comments in each for more info:

This post indicated the version which "keypool" has been introduced: /index.php?topic=1414.0
The commit that introduced keypool and the default 100 value: key pool for safer wallet backup

Then the default was changed to 1000: PR#10831: Batch flushing operations to the walletdb during top up and increase keypool size.
Commit: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/10831/commits/41dc1635878766e4a810e6a7c57637d079fced64

Compressed PubKey was introduced in this PR: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/649 That was posted years before the default keypool was set to 1000.

I think the default key pool size for HD wallet is increased to 1000 which is the default unless if your wallet was generated from an old wallet(Bitcoin QT) by default it's a 100 key pool size.

You can change the key pool size anytime if you want to generate more than 1000 you can add this in your Bitcoin.conf file


10k is just an example you can change it if you want lesser than 1k or more than that.

There is nothing in an address that indicates whether it is derived from a compressed or uncompressed public key. I can't tell you when various wallets switched from uncompressed to compressed, but maybe somebody else can. Regardless, it is unlikely that you will be able to find out how many wallets have existed, how many addresses have been generated, and how many addresses were compressed or uncompressed addresses.

The original Bitcoin-Qt wallet created a pool of 100 addresses by default. That may or may not have changed when it was switched to an HD wallet. An HD wallet does not need a pool of addresses since an address can be generated on demand.


Maybe I am misunderstanding your question. You stated that your goal is to "check the plausibility of two .dat files containing a valuable address". Do you mean two different wallets having the same address that has bitcoins? If that is the case then I think the solution would start with finding the probability that any random address is in a UTXO. Then, by counting the number of addresses in a wallet, you can compute the probability of that wallet having an address in a UTXO. An address in a UTXO was generated by some wallet, so that gives you the probability that the wallet in question shares an address with another wallet (assuming that it is not the wallet the created the transaction).

That's why I asked for a DEFAULT customer-created quantity then and today. For example - I find out about the existence of BitCoin ... I download the client and when creating a wallet I have my first address + x other  addresses for future transactions (by default). And that's what the question is ... how many were once outside the main (uncompressed) and how many have been since they are compressed. I know that there is an unlimited amount, but the system, after creating the first wallet, does not generate and does not generate as many as it could fit on the disk.

In the past when wallets were made, addresses normally weren't the default expectation (I'm not sure if that's still the case). There was a keypool introduced at some point to help with backups but this was something that could be changed to a users' needs via the command line, as well as the number of addresses in a wallet (actively displayed).

I think your approach has a problem because the number of addresses that can be generated by a wallet is unlimited.

I think a better approach might be to compare the total number of addresses in the block chain to the number of possible addresses.

Hello,
I have a question to check the plausibility of two .dat files containing a valuable address. In order to complete this check, I need knowledge about the generated number of additional addresses when creating a wallet in the past (when uncompressed addresses were created) and today (when compressed addresses are created).
Well, in this old one there is one valuable with an uncompressed address (with an allegedly forgotten password) and 1000 empty uncompressed ones. No outbound transaction has been made. The other one has one valuable compressed address and 200 other blank compressed addresses. At first glance, I could say that these are stickers to the original empty wallets, because the number of all wallets is 1001 and 201 (i.e. one too many), although the second theory I take into account is the fact that this one too many is the main address and the others 1000 and 200 are additional addresses. Nevertheless - in order to dispel these doubts - I am asking as at the beginning. Thanks in advance for your help.
P.S. I have my own control methods, so seriously - I'm only interested in the knowledge of the structure in terms of which I asked :-)

[EDIT]

And a second question:
Until what period (date) did the client generate uncompressed addresses by default, and how many of them? Similarly - how many compressed addresses were generated by default by the client at a later time?