Bitcoin Forum

Hello Fellow Miners,

I have been mining for about 6-8 Months now, starting with alot of gaming gear we started out at 2Gigahash, and with expanding and such we are mining today at 20Gigahash, on a blade, some erupters and even some GPU power.

Now I have bought a hard disk drive, installed windows on it, installed QT wallet, made some incoming payment adresses, encrypted the wallet and made it my payout wallet for my pool. It has been paying out there ever since. I removed the HDD from my PC and stored it safely. I have a copy of the wallet.dat file and the password is stored safely in a safe on a paper. And this is where my real question comes, does a wallet.dat file get old ? As in, i do some stuff send and receive some BTC, i will generate a couple adresses, will my wallet.dat file that i made prior to all those actions include all these actions (for i dont know what is stored on the chain and what is stored on the .dat )

If anyone could shed some light on this i would very much appreciate !


Thanks in Advance

SafeMiner

the wallet.dat is just like a .txt - it contains your private and public keys encrypted and they'll work as long as the bitcoin network exists

So this means then, that only one backup of the wallet is needed? It will then autosync and update with all later transactioned if restored at a later time, once other transactions have occured?

you could even keep a backup on paper. and yes, one backup is enough but may not be the safest route.

armory is a really good software to keep and backup a wallet offline/online

Ok thanks for the clarification.

Could you maybe tell me how I can store my wallet.dat on paper ? Do i have to open it with notepad ? Or how is the method to do this ?

Thanks in Advance

Backing up a wallet generated by the official "satoshi" bitcoin client onto paper is hard, because you have to export each private key [1]

Also with the official "satoshi" bitcoin client when you generate a new address another change address is created in a hidden key pool. In short you are meant to create a new backup of the new generated keys when this happens. (also you are meant to backup the wallet from the satoshi client everytime you create a new address to receive coins)

Also when backing up a private key, take the address from the client and check that addresses balance on http://blockchain.info/ (http://blockchain.info/) because the official "satoshi" bitcoin client keeps some of your coins in hidden addresses that might not be obvious.

Do you want a solution to this mess? Use a deterministic wallet where all the keys in the wallet are all generated from a seed key. Two wallets offer this functionality, https://bitcoinarmory.com/ (https://bitcoinarmory.com/) and http://electrum.org/seed.html (http://electrum.org/seed.html)

This is the difference, if you have a thousand addresses in your wallet file, with the satoshi client you would have to export every key and print them all out. (Or send all the coins to a single address and export that key) However with Armory and Electrum you only need to backup the seed, this seed can hold millions of keys. Far more secure.

[1] - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=168957.msg1757503#msg1757503 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=168957.msg1757503#msg1757503)

I can vouch for electrum; I have my wallet's seed hand-written on a little piece of paper that I keep in a safe spot (it's definitely not under my mattress), and keep a few of the public addresses on my desktop so I can ship some coin there whenever I want to add to my savings.

I rebuild the wallet on occasion to make sure everything is in order (I'm a tad paranoid about it.)  So far, it's been totally secure.

The wallet.dat is the most important, I also save the addr.dat (is renamed perhaps).

Avoid a single point of failure.

1) Create incoming addresses as needed
2) Encrypt the wallet (against theft)
3) test incoming and outgoing transactions with small amounts (against password misspelling)
4) write down the encryption password and distribute it over at least 2 different locations (different cities perhaps, against fire)
5) Copy the wallet.dat to at least 2 different media, and distribute them over at least 2 different locations (different cities perhaps, against theft or fire)
I use different media. It could happen that 4 cheap identical USB sticks fail all at the same time because of a systematic failure.
Store passwords and media on different locations.

I would NOT extract the private and public keys of the wallet and make a paper-wallet of it. Then the wallet encryption does not make much sense.