Bitcoin Forum

I am running  Bitcoin_qt   018.1.  windows
There is a file named "wallet" but it is not directly readable. How can I see the amount of bitcoins in my wallet?

Your balance should be visible once you open Bitcoin Core. You might need to add -rescan to your startup parameters since you had a problem (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5174171.msg52530136#msg52530136) with your node. The wallet file should have .dat extension and be located in the datadir set in the startup parameters.

Find your bitcoin-cli.exe Note the folders path

Goto Command or cmd

cd [path]

Then run

bitcoin-cli getbalance

It should show you atleast 1 confirmation balance of all addresses available.

I have 0181 and the previous version installed on a disk in 2 separate folders. Searching the disk I do not find any file named
Bitcoin-cli.exe

Did you try opening the wallet as ETFbitcoin suggested ?

Is your wallet file encrypted ? How does it look like when opening it in a text editor ?
Is it just random garbage or human readable language ?

Also, are you sure that this wallet is from core ?
Core's wallet files usually have an extension (wallet.dat). Electrum on the other hand doesn't have any extension (e.g. default_wallet).

The Bitqoin program bitcoin-qt runs ok and obviusly finds the wallet. opening the wallet shows data that is unreadable. Running bitcoin-qt is no problem. Is there a program I can use that can show me the content of the wallet?

Why do you want to open the wallet file without using bitcoind or bitcoin-qt?

What are you trying to open the wallet file with? A text editor?

Please clarify what your end goal is so others can help. The wallet file is supposed to be open with bitcoin-qt.

The program that normally shows the content of the wallet.dat file is bitcoin-qt. There are third party programs out there that can do stuff like salvage the wallet or insert other addresses, but the latest version of the qt wallet can already do all of these.

Again, back up the wallet.dat file before you do anything to it if you have coins stored there (as in, coins sent to the addresses) because that file contains all the private keys.

Some data/information of wallet.dat could be extracted/parsed with dumpwallet (https://bitcoincore.org/en/doc/0.16.1/rpc/wallet/dumpwallet/) command or tools such as https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet (https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet)

If you want to extract/parse more data, there's no choice other than analyze source code of Bitcoin Core to see how wallet.dat is created and read.

Answering bob question could give us better information and probably an answer to your question above.


Try to open it with Electrum if you're unsure. If that failed too, then use wallet recovery program. If that also failed, the chance is your "wallet" file is way too corrupted.

The wallet file itself is a binary file format, you will not be able to open it in a text editor and see anything really "human readable"... specifically, it is Berkeley DB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB) format file. There may be tools that allow you to open and read it, but generally speaking, the only program you should be using to access this file is Bitcoin Core.

What exactly are you attempting to do with your wallet.dat file? Are you trying to extract the private keys? Are you wanting to get your addresses and/or bitcoin balance without having to sync the whole blockchain? ???

Use pywallet on github to dump the private keys, if you import them later to lets say electrum you can see the balances without downloading the blockchain.