Bitcoin Forum

I have my bitcoin currently at my blockchain wallet, I want to store them at my computer.
What are the things I need to do before I send my funds to my wallet?

Also, my wallet says 6 years and 43 weeks behind...

I think you will need to wait for the client to fully snyc before you can transfer funds. Its going to take a while.

Obviously remember to backup your wallet.dat too.

Correct, it greatly depends on your internet connection, disk and CPU speed. You currently have to download and verify ~55 Gigabyte of blockchain data.

It's going to take you like 3 days to download the full blockchain. Wait for it to download then copy a bitcoin receiving address you have in Core into blockchain.info & send your bitcoin's to Core brother.

You can send funds to Core before the full sync if you want but your wallet balance won't show until you're fully synced.

Don't forget to back up your wallet in Core regularly.

In ten minutes it has done 25 weeks, so it will take a few hours to fully sync with the network.
Though my coputer needs often a reset, because it can not update and every week it has a scheduled update which i can't cancel :(
So mayby a wallet that needs to sync not the best for me.

Edit: It has done now 1 year in 15 minutes, so it wont take 3 days :)
That is fast i think :) also at the same time i am installing visual studio so, prety fast for this pc :)

I dont know about you, but i use an ssd for my main os and since its takes up so much space to store all the information what ive done is switched so the whole lot saves to a seperate bigger hdd.

It will get slower the closer you get because the blocks got bigger over time.

Maybe not. There are other local wallets that sync within minutes, multibit (hd), electrum (2), just to name two. Maybe this[1] page can help.


[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

1 year in 15 minutes?

Damn you must have a fast internet connection & expensive PC.

Noo lol my pc is just trash, Intel Pentium :(
It is a 2 years old pc and I think it is worthless, it crashes many times :(

And thank you shorena for that link, I will look at it :)

:) watch some bitcoin documentaries on youtube, you will get a little grasp what bitcoin is
next buy some little of bitcoin from any exchange, send to your wallet and wait until it will synchronize
then sent it to anyone, to see how it works

now u understand how bitcoin is easy, fast and cheap :)

It's fast initially and that's normal, because there were not so many tranactions in early days.

I guess it won't take 3 whole days but your sync speed will surely get slower later. ;).Good luck.

I already have some bitcoin :)
Today I have won a 0.1 BTC promotion and now  have over 100$ in bitcoin, if my withdrawl gets in :)
I have never had an amount of over 100$ in bitcoin.

My wallet is now on 4 years and 11 weeks behind, with a little pause inbetween :)

after the clien finish to sync, do a back up of the holw bitcoin folder, so the next time you don't need to download the whole blockchain again

now you can simply acquire bitcoin in some way and send them to the address of your wallet

Hmm backup is prety sure thing I must do that. But what means lock wallet and unlock wallet?
If I don't lock it, there is no password on it?

Yeah, the lock basically puts a password on it. Which is essential.

Thank you, I thought it was like locking it so you can't send from the address. So if it is locked I still can spend mt bitcoin or do I need to unlock it then and after spending lock it again?

Nah, anytime you try to spend anything u need to unlock it. To get sent btc you obviously dont need to do anything.

You dont need to lock it no, it will automatically do that. You will however need a new backup after setting a password for the first time. Bitcoin core comes with 100 pregenerated keys. Only those shown to you in the GUI will be part of the encrypted wallet, all others will be removed. This is to make sure there are as little unprotected private keys on your disk as possible. Due to the 100 keys you will also have to make regular backups, depending on the amount of address/priv. key pairs you need.

That is very confusing, I think I will stick to blockchain then and backup my privte key.
If I have my private key, that is good enough for getting my coins back if I loose access to the wallet?

Each address has a private key, if you use bitcoin core it will create and use more addresses, e.g. for change. If you only received coins on one address and never spend any coins you can just export the private key and import it into a different wallet/serivce. I think multibit or electrum are more up your alley, they only need a single backup of the seed and sync quickly. It will cover all keys (unless those imported). Maybe create a wallet and just look at it for a bit without having any coins in it.

Yes, I will look into multibit or electrum. When I am fully synched with my wallet then I need to lock it or not?
And then after locking save wallet .dat and copy the ptivate key?

Just another newbie question: saving private key means copying the text and paste somewhere u can always reach(on paper and usb)??

Well if you dont really use it you might as well set no password and just move the coins out of there. If you plan to use any wallet for a longer time you should get a good password for it.


The private key(s) are in the wallet.dat yes. If you set a password the private keys are encrypted in the file.


Depends on the wallet. MultibitHD and Electrum have seed words you can write on paper. Bitcoin core has the wallet.dat file you would make copies of.

You need a lot of space in your computer. At present, it needs 56GB harddisk space in my PC. The requirement will rise fast next year when bitcoin becomes popular.

Any wallet where I don't have to download the whole blockchain?

SPV wallets like Electrum, MultiBit don't download the entire Blockchain, just the block headers. This means that they do not verify the whole block but follows the longest chain that it can find. It presents a problem since it trust the miners and it was affected in the 4th July fork. However, this is a minor issue since most miners have stopped SPV mining.

What happened on 4th july? And what does SPV mining mean, like staking?

On July 4, majority of the blocks mined were V3 block and hence the network reaches consensus to switch to v3 blocks. On that day, a miner mined a v2 block which was considered invalid under v3 and hence miners rejected it and bitcoin Core V0.9.5+. However, miners running SPV mining continued on that wrong chain which resulted in those Bitcoins mined in those invalid blocks being invalid and there was a long block reorg for SPV clients(multibit/electrum etc) since it took time for big mining pools to switch to the correct fork.*

No one reported any double spending attempts however. Miners SPV mine to eliminate verification time and thus reducing the stale rate.

* I believe there is more story to it. I can't understand it well and can't give a good explanation.

So I only need to download the v3 blockchain, is that correct? If yes, what wallet should I use, an SPV or Electrum/Multibit?

No. SPV clients only verify the block headers. They trust the miners to enforce the rules and follow the longest chain. SPV clients are Electrum/Multibit. I prefer Electrum though. Anyway, this problem existed with Bitcoin Core below 0.9.5 and hence it's a must to upgrade the client regularly.

Edit: SPV clients are actually safe if the client connects to a node that enforces the correct network rules. Electrum automatically go for the node that has the longest chain so you need to edit the preference to prevent going to the wrong fork.

So the miners can manipulate the blockchain?

Thank you for you suggestion, I will stop my bitcoin core wallet because I dont want 60 gb to be wasted.

Pretty normal situation for someone who wants to use Bitcoin Core. Meaning you need to download and sync all the blockchain information since the genisis block. AFter that, you have a running node and helping the network stay decentralized

If no one would have the bitcoin core wallet, then bitcoin would be a dead coin?
Or is the blockchain also hosted by companies, like blockchain, or is that different?

Full nodes verify each block to ensure that it follow the rules and consider them as invalid if they do. However, in the fork, clients running 0.9.4 and below thought that it was valid and proporgated it. Since SPV Clients do not verify the entire block, they thought it was valid too. I don't find it to be a huge drawback from using an SPV client unless you are a merchant which process large transactions on a daily basis.
If no one is running a full node, Bitcoin would not exist. There must be at least one Bitcoin Core client running at all times. Services like Blockchain.info, Blocktrail.com all run a full node to keep track of the data.

So bitcoin could go down if no one host the nodes, if this happens, can someone just download the node and host it on his computer? Or a computer can't handle that?

If in a scenario, no one host a node, you would not be able to get the data of the new blocks from your peers. If you are the only person on earth to have a node, with no latest blockchain data, any data after your last Bitcoin block would be forgotten. Of course, you can mine the blocks and continue the blockchain but it is not plausible with the high difficulty.

So once the blockchain goes down no one will be able to recover it?
If I run the bitcoin core wallet it says 6 peers, so only 6 people host the blockchain at that moment?

Unless they run a node again or upload the latest blockchain elsewhere.

No. There are approximately more than 5047 Bitcoin nodes (https://bitnodes.21.co/) that has 8333 port opened. A Bitcoin node with default settings only allow 8 outgoing connection unless you open port 8333 which will enable incoming connections.

edit: oops I meant the other way round. changed.

What is a coin.ph wallet? Does that wallet need to sync with the network like the bitcoin core node?

I've never heard of coins.ph!, i would recommend you to use electrum if you can't download full block chain.

Its an online wallet service commonly used in the philippines.

Something like CoinBase I guess https://coins.ph/.
I don't think they allow the signing of message using their address though, or controling your private key. Electrum takes up very little space.

So it is kind of a fake wallet if they won't give me the private key of an address i create.
I will download electrum, thanks for support everyone!

I think you should use a lite wallet, such as Electrum, which doesn't have to download the entire chain into your HDD.
All you need to do is make sure you've copied the right address from your receiving wallet, and send your funds there.
Encrypt your wallet, so you have an extra layer of security.

Its a shared wallet. Services like those do not give private key as they do not want the user to move the funds without their authorization. At least that's what gambling sites and exchanges wants to achieve.

Good luck with Electrum. Don't forget to backup your 12 word seed!

Is that similar to the password phrase I get when creating a new wallet with blockchain.info?

No. I don't think they use BIP32 HD seeds. The seed Electrum gives is the key to all the address that is going to be generated there. If you don't keep a backup, you can lose all your addresses if you have a hard drive failure for example. The wallet can recover all the addresses generated just by using the seed.

So that password phrase is kind of an private key? Or will I also get a private key and the "seed"?

The seed is a kind of private key but it isn't a private key. Simply said, the private keys are all generated from the seed and is hence deterministic.

You can extract the private key too. Seed is just a method that BIP32 uses to generate private keys that are determined. Clients like Bitcoin Core generate change addresses randomly and hence requires regular backup.

You have to sync your wallet before being able to use it! and That's a long process I have to say. I suggest you should download the blockchain to your PC and fasten the syncing process ;D blockchain is somewwhere around 21GB

It takes hours to synchronize a wallet on a newer computer.
Downloading bootstrap.dat is actually slower since the client still needs to verify it and can't do it simultaneously while it is downloading. Bitcoin Core already acts like a torrent from V0.10.0.
Blockchain is ~55GB as of now.



Thank god Yobit have a 20 post limitation

well acutally I didn't mean to abuse it because I don't use bitcoincore for a while so I just estimate the size of blockchain only ;D