Bitcoin Forum

Can you have more than one wallet?  I want to also set up my HTPC to GPU-mine and was thinking of using another pool to compare productivity, can I use a different wallet for that machine?

Yes you can.

https://multibit.org/
https://bitcoinarmory.com/

Certainly. I have several.

You can also have more than one address per wallet.


Yes.

If you add both pc's in an account on a mining pool you'll be able to see the difference pretty quickly.

Cool, thanks for the info guys!

Another thought,...if I use the same pool, I don't necessarily even need to download a wallet onto each mining machine, do I? As long as one machine has the wallet, I can transfer the coins to it.  Right?

Yep, you sure can.

You could create one address for each pool and keep them all in one wallet.  Or you could make one wallet for each pool.  Or just have one address to receive all your funds and use the pool's account page to view how much you've made from each.  (much easier)

Yes you can specify on the command line the location of your wallet.dat

i've never done this before though

make backups first!

Yeah, this seems the easiest.  Each pool has its own website, leave the coins there until they are 0.5, then just have it auto-transfer when it hits that.  No need for each machine to have a wallet.

How often do we back up the wallet? I've just been doing it after each transaction, is that enough?

I'm doing it at the same rate. Just have a question? What do I do with that backup? I mean how do I restore a wallet from that backup? There seems to be no option to do that in the bitcoin-qt client.

Yeah, I wonder as well. I don't see a back-up function within he bt client anywhere.

The backup contains the next 100 addresses that you will use.  The wallet uses one of those 100 addresses every time you click the "New Address" button in the "Receive Coins" section.  In addition the wallet uses one of those 100 addresses every time you create a transaction with Bitcoin-Qt to send any bitcoins anywhere.

As long as you have at least one good backup that was created within the last 100 addresses used, you'll be able to recover all the bitcoins in your entire wallet from the backup.

How often this needs to be depends on how often you create new addresses, and how often you send bitcoins.

Once a month is enough for many people.  Some people should be doing it every week.  If you play a lot of SatoshiDice, you might want to be backing up every day (or more often).

It's a good idea to be backing up more often than necessary, that way you have multiple good backups in case a backup itself is damaged, lost, or unusable.

The Bitcoin-Qt wallet isn't very well designed for users.  It requires at least a bit of technical knowledge to use it safely, and even more technical knowledge for anything more than receiving and sending transactions.

As an example, there is no "Restore from backup" option built into the wallet.  Instead you have to be aware of where the wallet happens to store the wallet.dat file on your particular operating system and then place your backup file in that location.  You should make sure that Bitcoin-Qt is not running when you replace that file with the backup file, and you should be certain that there is nothing in the current wallet.dat file that you want/need to keep.  When you start up the wallet, it will use whatever wallet.dat file happens to be in that directory.

Depending on your technical skills, you may want to look into some of the lightweight wallets such as Electrum, MultiBit, and https://blockchain.info/wallet

Note that every bitcoin wallet that currently exists has its own "quirks" and unexpected behaviors.  They all have need of some improvement before they can be considered 100% ready for an average non-technical user. 

So all we have to do is replace the .dat with the backup and we're good to go?  Much like replacing a cracked dll file?

Yes, but it's more like replacing a word document with the backup.

Store the backup of the wallet.dat in a TrueCrypt container with a very long password and safe it somewhere online. (dropbox, google drive)
Then you don't have a problem when your computer crashes  :)

it's not only possible, but also recommended

Recommended?  By who?  Why?

Say I wanted to set away 1BTC for my daughter (when she's born), and then give it to her years later.

What's the best way to store the wallet securely for long periods of time? Was thinking something like encrypted cloud backups + hard copy somewhere, with the encryption secret off in a couple of safety deposit boxes, but all of that's probably overkill for a small balance.

It's difficult to say what 1 BTC will be worth in a few decades.  You might not think it's overkill if the exchange rate gets to $100,000 per BTC someday.

Hardcopy is probably the safest option.  I'd suggest multiple hard copies stored in multiple locations that you know will be secure.

Perhaps keep one hard copy with the birth certificate (since you are likely to be able to keep track of that for a few decades), then another copy in a safety deposit box somewhere (if you already have one).

As long as you are confident that you'll be able to retrieve the hardcopy, there isn't much need for cloud backups for long term storage.

Very useful read!

Thank you.

Ah, excellent idea keeping it with the birth certificate.

As for a safety deposit box, I don't have one, but probably need one anyway. I'll see what our bank has.