Bitcoin Forum

Hi,

I use bitcoin-qt and I had an encrypted wallet.dat file stored in a few safe places.
I wanted to check whether I still remembered the password. I copied the stored wallet.dat file into the Bitcoin folder and opened Bitcoin-qt. The quickest way I could think of testing whether I remembered the password was to select the option "create new password", which obviously requires the old password.  Upon performing this action and therefore confirming that I do remember the password of the stored wallet.dat I proceeded to delete this "testing" wallet. I have not made any transactions or any other actions with the testing wallet.

However, later on, I have read that every time you change your password previous backups of the wallet become useless. I have run again bitcoin-qt using the old back-up and the funds are still there, however I would like to ask to the experts of the forum whether these wallets are now useless or whether I could face some problems in the future.

Thank you.

This is only true in certain cases and only for newly generated private keys. You however did not create a new key, thus your old backup is still valid.


As long as you create a copy of your backup no matter what you do with said copy will invalid your original backup. It will still have all the keys it had before. The only thing you potentially could do is use the keys in the copy and e.g. send change to a newly generated key. This would not make your old backup invalid (still has the same private keys), but it would be without bitcoin (those are only spendable with a new private key that is not part of your original back).

I hope this clears it up, if not ask.

If you just want to check passphrase, you can open a debug windows and type this command:


60 is the number, in seconds, the wallet will stay open.

Thanks guys.

If there is not keylogger that could memoryze the password when you wrote it in then i guess it's secure. Otherwise always do a system scan for viruses before you access your wallet.