Bitcoin Forum

hello
what happens if receiving wallet is disconnected and stays like that for some time. (lets say for 1 month)
does the sent BTCs bounce or be lost?
are they automatically received once receiving wallet is brought back online. (I mean bitclient with that particular wallet is connected to internet)

The wallet will continue to receive transactions at its designated address whether its online, or offline for 20 years.

To see the balance, just put the wallet back online. If the blockchain is up to date, it will show the correct balance.

they will not be lost. 

you can also generate addresses (and their corresponding private keys) offline with bitaddress.org or brainwallet.org.  

then print out the paper wallet or remember the passphrase for a brainwallet and never worry about losing your wallet.dat if your computer is compromised, because the private keys will have never been stored on your computer in the first place!   you can check the address at blockchain.info anytime you wish to verify your balance.

The simple answer:
The receiving wallet doesn't need to be online.
There is no risk of "not getting" coins and they can't bounce.
The only way to "lose" coins is to lose (stolen, deleted, corrupted) the private key in the wallet for the address coins were sent to.

The real answer ... "there is no spoon".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzm8kTIj_0M

You don't actually receive bitcoins and the sender doesn't actually send them to you.  

The blockchain is public ledger.  Anyone can look up the current "balances" (technically unspent outputs but lets say balances for now) of addresses.  When a sender "sends" coins they are simply transferring ownership of the coins in the public ledger.  They sign that transfer with their private key.  The network verifies that signed transaction and that ensures only the owner of the private key could have made this ownership change.  The record is then updated.

At any point in time your client knows how many coins you "own" by looking at the current balance in the blockchain for each of your addresses.  The coins never "move".  They never need to get sent to you.

So you could extract the private keys from your wallet, write them down on a piece of paper, die, and 20 years from now someone find the paper import it into whatever wallet currently exists and gain control of those coins.

hey death - i've been wondering if its possible for someone to generate the same private key as someone else, unknowingly?  i see how it could happen using a very insecure brainwallet. 

With something like a brain wallet that is possible because the entropy is low.  If the private key is simply a random number in theory it is possible but the odds are so astonishingly small you can consider it zero.  There are some threads with analysis but it is essential zero.

If you are sending BTCs locally (using bitcoin-qt), there is a possibility that the transaction isn't accepted into a block & needs to be rebroadcasted to the network.  And if you disconnect your client, the transaction can't/won't be rebroadcasted so the BTCs will never be sent.  But this can be avoided w/ higher fees if you are worried.  Or wait to disconnect until all your sent BTCs have at least 1 confirmation.  You can track received BTCs w/o software by just looking at blockchain.info.

thanks all for informative answers.
if I use a brain wallet or paper wallet, how can I "redeem" bit coins if I decide to spend them

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=106038.0
http://bitcoinarmory.com/index.php/using-offline-wallets-in-armory

All coins are effectively stored in the bitchain.  The wallet only records your ability to spend them.  therefore, when your wallet has been offline for years and you reconnect, you simply update your balance and crack on!

Think of the blockchain as a bunch of mailboxes.  Anyone can send you bitcoins, but only you have the key to open it.  And with that key comes the ability to send bitcoins.  So anytime you want to spend bitcoins, you can just create a transaction, signed it with your private key, and broadcast it to the network (most of which is handled quite easily with most bitcoin clients).  You never need to "redeem" anything.  It will sit in your mailbox until the end of time.