Bitcoin Forum

So I want to send coins from my online wallet to my cold storage wallet.

Should I just send it to the address of my cold storage wallet? Or sweep? What exactly is the difference?

I know sweeping moves the whole balance. But other than that, is it exactly the same?

Thanks

Sweeping is using your private key on another client and sending all the coins on that key to another address, while just sending the coins doesn't require you to export your private keys.

The end result of just sending the coins or sweeping is the same, the difference being in exposing the private key while sweeping and exposing your password while sending.

Ok thanks.

I just set up a cold storage wallet on an offline computer and a watching only wallet on my online computer.

I want to send everything from my blockchain wallet to my electrum wallet. Should I just send the full amount instead of sweeping?

I notice I can only sweep from the offline wallet. What's the process if I sweeped?

Do I have to do the transaction thing as outlined here? http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html

Finally, is there a way to get the cold storage wallet to show the correct balance?

I sent a small amount of btc to the watching only wallet so it shows a balance but since the offline computer has no way of knowing this, it doesn't show any transaction history or balance.

Sorry lot of questions. I read the documentation but it doesn't really have a lot of detailed instructions for cold storage.

You can just send, it's probably easier to do so from an online wallet, and the option to sweep on Electrum is greyed out when using a watch only copy.

The website you referred is explaining how to create a transaction on the online computer, sign it on the offline one and broadcast it on the online one, doesn't really apply to sweeping.

The cold storage wallet cannot show you a balance, obviously, otherwise it wouldn't be cold storage.

Ok just sent them. Everything seem to be in order except for 1 transaction that isn't confirming

But all in all whole process was a lot easier than I thought it'd be.

Sweeping is used when you have a private key of a paper wallet and you want to send the bitcoins there to your electrum wallet. Otherwise you just send the bitcoins to a receiving address in the target wallet.