Bitcoin Forum

I am fairly new to Bitcoin and recently I created a cold wallet using Tails on an USB-Stick. To see the history of my transactions, I created a watch-only wallet on my online machine. Now I have two questions:

1. If I want to transfer Bitcoin to my cold wallet, it is enough to create a recieve request in the watch-only wallet and send it to the adress generated by this request?
2. Is it possible to create multiple watch-only wallets on different machines for the same cold wallet?

1.  I'm guessing you imported the xPub instead of one address? If so, then yes. That should be sufficient.
2. Yes. That's possible. There's also Bluewallet if you want to watch your wallets from your mobile device (not sure if electrum mobile version does that): https://bluewallet.io/watch-only/

Yes to both questions.

1. If you've properly created the cold-storage set-up, your watching-only wallet should be able to re-create addresses from your offline wallet.

2. There's nothing wrong with it since the coins aren't stored in your wallets.
Your coins are in the blockchain, your wallet only contains the necessary keys to spend those ("public keys" in your watching-only and "private keys" in your offline wallet).
It's like creating a duplicate car/home key.

Yes.

However,  you don't need to create a receive request (only if you want).
Just get your Public address from the cold wallet and transfer the funds to that address.

Public addresses can only receive, not spend, so it is safe to share them.


Yes. Simple import the xpub or each individual address into the wallets you want.
You can create as many as you want , there is no limit.

Thank you for your answers :)
Just to clear things up, I used Electrum as Software and created the watch-only with the master public key as described in the Electrum docs.

For number 1, if you use the device with the watch only wallet for a lot of things and there's a decent chance it could get malware then I'd suggest checking the address matches the offline one for larger transfers but it might not matter as much to you for smaller ones.

Take note that you don't have to make a request before receiving fund.
You can go to "Addresses" tab and pick any of addresses you see there. All of those addresses are yours and can be used for receiving bitcoin.

If you don't see "Addresses" tab, click on "View" at top of the window and select "Show addresses".

This is a good point as online devices are more prone to get infected with malwares (ie. clipboard hijacker malware. However, you don't really want to open your offline wallet every time you are going to receive a new payment. This is not a good practice if you want your wallet to remain as safe as possible.
A better alternative would be to use the ismine command from the watch only wallet to check if the copied address does really belong to your wallet. Can someone confirm if it's possible to run commands from a watch only wallet, pls.

To make sure of that, I just created a watch-only wallet and tested it with ismine command in console tab. As shown in the following image, that's possible.

https://i.imgur.com/2imWzcr.jpg