Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Bitcoin Technical Support => Topic started by: matriculator on January 17, 2014, 04:08:39 PM



Title: Do I need to always update wallet?
Post by: matriculator on January 17, 2014, 04:08:39 PM
I have my wallets- more than one cryptocurrency- backed up on things like flashdrives. Whenever I receive a transaction, do I need to replace the wallet I have in the flashdrive with the one in the roaming folder because it contains the new transaction? Or do the coins just go to the address and even if I uninstall the client for the cryptocurrency and leave the backed up wallet in the flashdrive, when I redownload it'll have the transaction? Thank you. Sorry for the confusing question.


Title: Re: Do I need to always update wallet?
Post by: Junkey on January 17, 2014, 04:17:06 PM
You should update the wallet to send coins.  You will always receive coins.


Title: Re: Do I need to always update wallet?
Post by: deepceleron on January 17, 2014, 04:30:41 PM
The Bitcoin-qt wallet has a default of 100 extra keys for future use in a key pool. It is only necessary to create another backup when this key pool is nearing exhaustion.


Title: Re: Do I need to always update wallet?
Post by: matriculator on January 17, 2014, 04:42:30 PM
You should update the wallet to send coins.  You will always receive coins.

Thank you.


Title: Re: Do I need to always update wallet?
Post by: matriculator on January 17, 2014, 04:43:19 PM
The Bitcoin-qt wallet has a default of 100 extra keys for future use in a key pool. It is only necessary to create another backup when this key pool is nearing exhaustion.

Back up of the wallet itself?


Title: Re: Do I need to always update wallet?
Post by: deepceleron on January 17, 2014, 04:52:45 PM
I see from the original post you thinking that you should backup when you receive payment, which is incorrect. The ownership of Bitcoins is recorded on the blockchain, not in your wallet. You only need your wallet to spend the bitcoins you own.

Every time you create a new Bitcoin address to receive bitcoins, and almost every time you send bitcoins, a new address is taken from the reserve pool of addresses - spare addresses that are in your wallet but not shown to you. When the reserve pool of 100 addresses is used up, new addresses will be created by Bitcoin that aren't in your backup. This will result in lost money if you need to restore your backup. Therefore you should make another wallet backup regularly, after sending ~50 transactions or creating ~50 new receive addresses.

To backup, simply use the "backup wallet" option in the file menu.


Title: Re: Do I need to always update wallet?
Post by: BookLover on January 17, 2014, 11:55:24 PM
Every time you create a new receiving address or send coins you use an address from the keypool, so if you create a new receiving address every time you receive coins then you still need to backup your wallet before you use up the keypool.  You can change the size of the keypool so that you can go longer between backups.


Title: Re: Do I need to always update wallet?
Post by: empoweoqwj on January 18, 2014, 10:34:10 AM
I see from the original post you thinking that you should backup when you receive payment, which is incorrect. The ownership of Bitcoins is recorded on the blockchain, not in your wallet. You only need your wallet to spend the bitcoins you own.

Every time you create a new Bitcoin address to receive bitcoins, and almost every time you send bitcoins, a new address is taken from the reserve pool of addresses - spare addresses that are in your wallet but not shown to you. When the reserve pool of 100 addresses is used up, new addresses will be created by Bitcoin that aren't in your backup. This will result in lost money if you need to restore your backup. Therefore you should make another wallet backup regularly, after sending ~50 transactions or creating ~50 new receive addresses.

To backup, simply use the "backup wallet" option in the file menu.

That is the correct advice. Ignore other advice on this thread :)