Bitcoin Forum

For safe keeping I am transferring a fixed amount to each of a number of addresses, which I've created in a single wallet in bitcoin-qt.  I've named each address and printed out their private keys to store somewhere. 

I've just noticed that it doesn't appear possible to view per-address balance in bitcoin-qt.  You can view the balance for the wallet as a whole in the "Overview" section.  You can view per-address transactions by right-clicking and choosing "Show transaction details" in the "Transactions" section.  But you can't view per-transaction balance?  Gah!

Can I also just check that conceptually, wallets are a purely client-side concept, just a way that a client aggregates multiple addresses together?

The stock client isn't really intended for that.  If you want a safe offline wallet, use Armory or just generate keys with vanitygen and use blockexplorer to track the balances.

You may be interested in this:  https://coderrr.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/patching-the-bitcoin-client-to-make-it-more-anonymous/

The wallet tries to make it so the concept of transferring money occurs in a familiar context.

Technically, however, it does not work the way it seems.   Bitcoins don't "transfer" from one wallet to the next.    Transactions are simply ledger entries.   The wallet holds the private keys necessary to create a transaction that spends from the coins received.

So the client will compute a total, and show transactions.   But all that can be done using the blockchain, without even having the wallet.dat, and instead just knowing which Bitcoin addresses were in the wallet.

That's what a service, BTCBalance.net offers:

 - http://btcbalance.net