Bitcoin Forum

Having some trouble here.  I printed out a Litecoin paper wallet with the Piper printer, I encrypted the wallet.  I sent some test Litecoins to the public key, and they show up on the blockchain.  So, I wanted to test importing the paper wallet into Litecoin QT.

I opened up the debug window, typed in: walletpassphrase 'my password' '300'

I get the error message: Error: running with an unencrypted wallet, but walletpassphrase was called. (code -15)

I then typed in the debug window: importprivkey 'my private key'

I get the error message: Invalid private key (code -5)




What am I doing wrong?  Am I missing a step or something?  I know I am typing in my password and the private key correctly.  I have tried it multiple times, resulting in the same error codes.  Thanks in advance!

This is an indication that the wallet.dat that you are importing into is not protected by a passphrase. Therefore the "walletpassphrase" command is not necessary for this wallet.


It sounds like a typo in the private key.  If you are using cut/paste, then perhaps you are missing the first few (or last few) characters?  You are not including the quotation marks around the private key are you?

For example, if your private key was 5Kb8kLf9zgWQnogidDA76MzPL6TsZZY36hWXMssSzNydYXYB9KF then you should type the following into the debug window:

Thanks for the reply.  Nope, I'm not using quotations.  I'm typing it just like you did.  Is there another step I have to do before just typing in the private key?  Like, do I have to type in the public key first somewhere in Litecoin-QT?  Basically the Piper printer prints out a paper slip that has the public and private key on it.  I typed the private key in letter by letter multiple times and keep getting the same error code.  There are definitely coins at the address because I can see them in the litecoin block explorer.

Assuming you are not making any errors when typing in the private key, it sounds like there is an error in Litecoin-Qt.

While this may be possible, I'd expect more people to be complaining about it.

it seems much more likely that you are not typing the private key correctly.  Probably making the same mistake every time.

Perhaps you are looking at an o and thinking it is a 0?

Maybe you are looking at a 1 and thinking it is an l or an I?

Any chance you are trying to import a Bitcoin private key into Litecoin?

I think the Piper allows you to encrypt the private key with BIP0038, right?

Perhaps you generated an encrypted private key?  If so, I don't think that Litecoin-Qt allows direct import of BIP0038 encrypted keys.  You'll probably have to decrypt the key first?

I think you might have just figured out the problem.  I'm pretty sure I did check the option to encrypt it with BIP0038.  How do I decrypt it so I can import to Litecoin-QT?

Hi there...  Did you find a solution?

I have the same problem here but with a BTC encrypted private key.

Thanks!