Bitcoin Forum

I've decided that it's time I claimed my Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin gold coins, and I decided to do this by setting up a new node under Ubuntu, and moving my coins into that. Then I'll claim the coins by using the old Windows wallet. I thought I would detail the steps as I do it, and you guys can comment and tellme if I'm making any mistakes. The target computer is a lower spec HP netbook, and it has only got a small internal SSD. I bought an external 2GB Toshiba drive to run this project.

The first thing to do was to find out where Windows was storing the blockchain, and I did this by searching for "blocks" in file manager. Once I had found this, I copied the Bitcoin directory onto the Tosh drive. Make sure that you copy it, and you don't try to move it. You don't want to mess up your Windows node. You need to copy the whole Bitcoin directory and not just the blockchain by the way. Once I had done this, I could move over to the Linux machine.

Plug the hard drive into the linux notebook, and check that the files can be read. You should have a load of files in the blocks directory under Bitcoin. If those look OK then you can start to download the core software. You can do this by opening a terminal and typing the following command
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin
enter the root password when prompted
Then update the Ubuntu software package list with this command
sudo apt-get update
Then install Bitcoin core itself with this command
sudo apt-get install bitcoin-qt
Enter "Y" when it asks you to.
You can start  Bitcoin core by entering the following into the terminal
Alternatively you can click on the icon

If all goes well, then you should get the welcome screen, and this will give you a choice of locations for the data directory. You don't want to use the custom directory, but select "use a custom directory". Click on the dots to the right of this, and select the Bitcoin directory on the external hard drive. Then click "OK". This will start Bitcoin core.

If you have selected the directory correctly, then core will start to rewind the blockchain it has found, and then start to synchronise it. You should only be a few hours behind. If it tells you thast you are 9 years or so, then you haven't found the copy of the blockchain. Leave this to complete the synchronisation, and you should see your coins in the new wallet.


More to follow when I get a chance to move to the next stage,

Just checking in as adviced in order to have this thread in my watchlist.
I am thinking about a similar thing, but not only for claiming altcoins but running an LN node (just for fun and to learn) on a Raspberry PI (I think it has a special linux OS) so this thread is really interesting for me.
Thanks for suggesting to copy the whole directory of blockchain on the external drive, I saw guys compaining about the Raspberry's speed (syncing the blockchain for several days), otherwise the speed of the Raspberry seems to be decent to run a small node.

I'm currently reflecting on the address structure that I will use. I want to keep the current addresses because I've listed them on several of my sites ( and Bitcoin talk ). I've got sites that give away things like images to use in websites, and I put a donation link on them. Not that anybody donates, but I live in hope. :)

I'll probably add a segwit addreess to the wallet on the Linux machine, and move coins into that. I'll try to do some zero fee transactions and see what happens. I can then use the Windows machine to claim the alts, and replays shouldn't be possible if everything is on the segwit address. I hope someone will comment if I've got that wrong.

I've got a bit of a holdup on this. It seems to be taking anything up to three hours to sync the blockchain on a daily basis. The disk activity seems to be pretty solid, and last time I tried this I used an SSD. I'm considering moving the Bitcoin directory onto a new SSD before I start to do anything else.

You dont need SSD to store blockchain, it just better be internal drive, not a usb connected. I have all of them sitting on Sata (AHCI) 4tb one. It syncs in minutes on daily basis. Cpu/memory is also a key. Geth is much more resource/disk hungry if you need ETH there as well.

I would highly recommend to build low cost desktop to store all crypto flavors. Junkyard i5 Dell would do it. 2 drives - OS on SSD (small, like 80-120gig, better 2 of them in raid 1 for piece in mind) and big one for chain. 16 gig ram min.

you can specify -datadir=xxxx command line option to bitcoin-qt to separate these data directories

also I would suggest pulling bitcoin wallet build from github: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases

When installing linux on SSD, encrypt all drives with LUKS/etc

Good luck!

I need to use netbooks and notebooks as part of my mobile project.

At the moment I'm snow bound in a KFC with rubbish WiFi. In fact, I gave up on it and tethered to my mobile. I was going to buy a 512Gb SSD for the netbook ( Ubuntu ), but I keep buying more bits of kit, so I'm going to see how I get on with the 256Gb SSD. I've got a few photos on it, but there is over 200Gb free, and I hope that is enough for the blockchain and other directories. I haven't checked the current size of the blockchain. I'll then run the node with that and see if it makes any improvement.

Well that's been copied - 171Gb for the directories. It was a lot faster than the Tosh, but that could have been because I was on USB3. It's probably a couple of days behind, and I'll sync it when I get on a better connection.