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Title: Why do I need a wallet.dat file for recovery Post by: shockload on March 05, 2014, 12:46:22 PM Idiot question here:
Assuming I have both my public and private key and all information about every transaction ever is stored on the blockchain (ie, it is provable what my balance is and everyone can see it / there is public consensus due to the ledger); why do I need a wallet.dat file to recover my coins? Title: Re: Why do I need a wallet.dat file for recovery Post by: BurtW on March 05, 2014, 12:56:39 PM Your private keys are not kept in the blockchain. They are kept in your wallet.dat file.
Your private keys are needed to spend/move your BTC. If the private key to an address is lost then the BTC at that address can NEVER be moved or spent again. Never. So back up your private keys by backing up your wallet.dat file on a regular basis. A lost wallet.dat file means the permanent loss of all the BTC in all the Bitcoin addresses associated to all the private keys in that wallet.dat file. Title: Re: Why do I need a wallet.dat file for recovery Post by: DannyHamilton on March 05, 2014, 05:38:56 PM If you have your private keys, you are set. You can use your private keys to compute your Bitcoin address' and as you said all of the transaction information is stored provably in the blockchain. You technically do not need your wallet file. You can import your private keys directly into your wallet software without the wallet.dat file. Your wallet.dat file is what holds your private keys you can always hold onto your private keys and import them when you need to spend your BTC. Note however, that you better be absolutely certain that you really understand what a private key is and how the wallet works. There have been people who thought that their passphrase was their "private key". Later when they went to recover their wallet, and they discovered that they misunderstood what a private key is, they were disappointed to learn that they would never again have access to the bitcoins. There have also been people who had some of their private keys, but didn't realize that the wallet creates additional addresses without telling you about it. It keeps these addresses hidden. They didn't have the private keys of these additional addresses, and therefore permanently lost access to some of their bitcoins. As long as you completely understand exactly what you are doing, and are very careful to do it correctly, it is sufficient to just have the private keys. In that case you do not need the wallet.dat. If there is any chance at all that you might mis-understand something, or make a mistake, then it is better to have the wallet.dat (since the wallet.dat has all the private keys). |