Bitcoin Forum

Sorry don't mean to clog up the forum with such a newbie question.  I've backed up my wallet and encrypted it in 3 places, I'd like my balance to be zero in my wallet.  While bitcoin is closed would I just delete the wallet file and a new one will be made?

I know there are other threads on things like this, but I just want to hear it directly before I do something dumb.

Thanks guys.

Mike

And just for safety's sake, if you do any transactions, back up the new wallet again.  Even if you send one penny, the "change" goes to a new invisible address in wallet.dat, and you don't want to lose that address.

There is apparently a mechanism for pre-generating keys, but someone in the forums reports having suffered a substantial loss (7000+ BTC) within the last week due to a difference in the way he expected this to work versus the way it apparently really does.  Don't chance it.  Never delete a wallet.dat - throw it on a USB stick and pack-rat it if you must.

Ok cool, and just to be clear to put money back in my wallet i'd just overwrite empty wallet.dat with my loaded wallet.dat yes? 

thanks for answering such simple questions.

If you are running an older version of the software you may need to run bitcoin.exe with the -rescan option after putting your wallet.dat file back for the balance to show up properly.

If your not familiar with the command line the easiest way to do that is to create a .txt file in the same folder as bitcoin.exe, type "bitcoin.exe -rescan" into the file then rename it something.bat and double click it.

That's a pretty big loss considering how much bitcoins are worth right now.  Over one hundred thousand dollars.