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Certainly. Bitcoin private keys are just 256-bit numbers. If the altcoin also uses ECDSA with 256-bit keys, then it is trivial to convert the key from Bitcoin to altcoin and vice versa. Just Base58 decode the private key and get its raw value. Then encode it with the altcoin's private key encoding and import.
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When a Bitcoin is sent to your public key the message is sent encrypted. Your private key is able to decrypt this info so that the transaction completes. In the unlikely event that somebody is able to create your public key from thier private key, your private key adds a signature to the public key to verify it was derived from your private key. This ensures that the private key that made the public key is the only key that can decrypt messages sent to the public key. This signature check is only made when the received Bitcoins are attempted to be spent/exchanged. It is only at this point it will be known if a 'hacker' private key received the transaction.
No. There is no encryption that goes on in transactions or blocks. There isn't even anything "sent" to a public key nor is there any such an object as a "Bitcoin". How transactions actually work is that outputs are created which have a specific set of requirements that must be met in order to be allowed to spend from the output. Those requirements are in the form of a script. The script is a mini program that is executed when another transaction is created that spends from that output. It actually consists of two parts, the output script (which goes in the output being spent), and the input script (which goes in the inputs section of the transaction spending the output). When concatenated together (input script cat with output script), the script must result in true by the end of its execution. Public and private keys come into this because the most common output type requires signature checking. It is called Pay to Pubkey Hash (P2PKH). These outputs require that a signature and public key are provided in the input script. The output script specifies that the hash of the public key must match the hash provided in the output (that hash comes from the Bitcoin address). Then it specifies that the signature verifies to the public key with the message it signed being a special form of the spending transaction. Wallet, spends/exchanges
A wallet is a collection of keys (private, public, wallet address) used to access/view relevant parts of the blockchain (the information, not the actual data). This is almost always some software to put these keys to use. Using your private key you can view the amount of Bitcoins you own, send payments and make a public key so that you can receive payments. The wallet is given an address that is a hash derived from the public key. Payments can be made to this wallet address. All I know is that the wallet address is used as an extra level of protection from private keys being reverse engineered from a public key. This is because the signiture check is only made when the received funds are attempted to be used. The wallet address hash adds protection through extra security and discouragement associated to the time element.
There is no such thing as a wallet address. There are multiple Bitcoin addresses in a wallet, but only one associated with each public key. There is not a single address for one wallet though. Addresses serve other purposes too. They are much smaller than a public key so it moves the cost from the sender to the receiver. They are also shorter and easier to remember and give out than public keys. Desktop
You download the blockchain and have a copy of the keys and wallet address.
Not necessarily. You don't need to have the full blockchain for the vast majority of desktop wallets. These wallets are called SPV wallets and they only need the headers chain. SPV wallets rely on other people running full nodes and connect to these full nodes with some special parameters. This way they can find out about their transactions and the blocks they are included in but don't need to actually download the entire blockchain. However you do lower your security and privacy in doing this as you are trusting someone else not to give you bad information. These keys are stored in wallet.dat (or similar). You absolutely must make backups of this file.
Only 1 wallet actually uses a wallet.dat file; every wallet has its own wallet file and format, the wallet.dat is just the one specific to Bitcoin Core. If you take the desktop wallet route, do you need to download the blockchain for all the currencies you use? I ask because at first I wanted to mine Ethereum. It took 10hrs to download the blockchain and takes up 20gb of my 128gb bootdrive. Space is one thing but the time it all takes is something akin to late 90's downloading. I should have done more reading because the dag is bigger than my vram. So I tried Monero. This didn't download any blockchain and just works by typing in a single line command into the miner and its off. Can desktop wallets work without downloading the blockchain?
My next task is to decide on a wallet... I thought about using the official desktop wallet for each currency I use but the blockchain download is putting me off. Any suggestions?
For the best security and privacy, you should use the wallet which downloads the entire blockchain. |
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Stop using blockchain.info. Their software is poorly written and full of bugs.
You can and should use a desktop wallet like Electrum.
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Bitcoin Core needs to sync, and that will take a relatively long time. It will need to download and verify the entire blockchain. That can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on your internet connection and the specs of the machine you are running it on. Until the blockchain is synced, your balance will not be correct.
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Here is a link to a picture for an example: http://imgur.com/a/Askm3 Obviously not the same address but you get the point when it said the address is expired but I sent the coins to the address anyway. Again, as I said, addresses do not expire. This just means that the service behind the wallet does not want to keep tracking transactions to that address so they "expire" it and stop watching for new transactions. This happens for exchanges like the one pictured because they will lock in a price for a transaction but don't want to be bound to that price and exchange Bitcoin at that price forever for however much is received at that address. So they "expire" the address and simply stop tracking transactions to that address. Since the expiration is a specific feature of the service you are using, contact their customer support. |
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You can't send Bitcoin to an Ethereum wallet unless that "wallet" is an exchange. I assume that you are talking about an exchange. In that case, contact the exchange's support. The Bitcoin is not lost and they will have access to it.
To the Bitcoin network, there is no such thing as an address expiring. Those "expirations" are only on the wallet software side of things. The Bitcoin is still spendable if you have access to the private keys.
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Thanks, tried 2 fresh installs,
Did you delete the blockchain or just uninstall and reinstall? If you only uninstalled and reinstalled, that won't help at all because none of the data is removed from the disk. on 2 different SSD, and version 13 and 14.1 with new wallets.
For some reason it just stops around April 7th 2015.
If you actually did a full resync where the blockchain actually redownloaded (and reindex does not do this, I'll get to that below), then this error is indicative of hardware failure. In that case, I suggest you run hardware diagnostics to find what is wrong. Also tried -reindex as well which re-downloaded everything, same issue, total of 5 block chain downloads.
Reindex does not redownloaded anything. All it does is reindex what is already on disk and then it will do the normal catch-up process with whatever blocks that you don't have downloaded. Reindexing is the process of building the databases that have all of the indexes of where to find blocks and transactions. It absolutely does not redownload the blockchain even though it looks like it. The only way to redownload the blockchain is to actually delete the blocks folder within the datadir and start Bitcoin Core. Nothing else will cause a resync; reindexing, rescanning, reinstalling, etc. will not cause a resync. I posted in that one persons thread because it seems to be an issue with the blockchain download, as the wallet version and drive doesn't seem to matter.
Could of course be OS related, so I'm going over that now.
His issue was completely unrelated. You clearly did not read the thread. |
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You have a corrupted block on disk. This means that you will need to resync the entire blockchain. Delete the blocks folder inside of the Bitcoin Core datadir and then start Bitcoin Core and let it sync.
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There is no such thing as an expired address. Addresses do not expire, that is not how Bitcoin works. Your Bitcoin is fine so long as you have access to the wallet that contains the address that you sent the Bitcoin to.
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It's done to discourage fee sniping. Bitcoin Core does this, and the comment in the source code describes why pretty well: // Discourage fee sniping.
//
// For a large miner the value of the transactions in the best block and
// the mempool can exceed the cost of deliberately attempting to mine two
// blocks to orphan the current best block. By setting nLockTime such that
// only the next block can include the transaction, we discourage this
// practice as the height restricted and limited blocksize gives miners
// considering fee sniping fewer options for pulling off this attack.
//
// A simple way to think about this is from the wallet's point of view we
// always want the blockchain to move forward. By setting nLockTime this
// way we're basically making the statement that we only want this
// transaction to appear in the next block; we don't want to potentially
// encourage reorgs by allowing transactions to appear at lower heights
// than the next block in forks of the best chain.
//
// Of course, the subsidy is high enough, and transaction volume low
// enough, that fee sniping isn't a problem yet, but by implementing a fix
// now we ensure code won't be written that makes assumptions about
// nLockTime that preclude a fix later.
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Appreciate the reply. While i completely agree with and understand every word in your statement out of curiosity, shouldn't at least the DL speed for BC Core be a lot more than 0.1 Mbps being displayed via task manager even if the overall process is being impeded by the other aforementioned bottlenecks and overall weak machine? Or do the other issues someone manage to directly impact the DL speed itself?
IIRC Bitcoin Core does not download the blockchain synchronously with the processing. It will download blocks as quickly as possible, minimally check them, and store them to be processed later. So what likely has happened is that the entire blockchain has been downloaded, but since your node is still processing them, you aren't synced yet. |
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IIRC blockchain.info's wallet uses BIP39 for the seed, so if you are absolutely sure that you are missing specifically the 12th word in the phrase (position matters, and knowing the absolute position means that it is much easier to brute force), then you can go through the BIP 39 wordlist and brute force your way in. There are only 2048 words used and they can be found here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt |
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1. I have $2K currently to play with that is fully available for this and ONLY this. To my understanding, I thought you had to purchase a full coin but it appears that you can invest in shares just like you do with stocks. Is this true?
You do not need to buy full coins. They are divisible down to 8 decimal places, so you can buy any fraction of a coin down to 8 decimal places. There is no need to buy one full coin. While hardware wallets can provide you with some of the best security, they almost always require that you use a SPV wallet, which are less secure than full node wallets. That is simply due to very few full node wallets existing and even fewer of them supporting hardware wallets. |
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There is a significant difference between what your browser is doing and what Bitcoin Core is doing. Core is not just downloading data; it is also verifying every single block and transaction and writing them all to disk. That means that there are multiple bottlenecks, not just network. You could have a CPU, RAM, or disk bottleneck. Given the specs of your machine, I am not surprised that it is taking so long to sync; your computer simply is not powerful enough to sync quickly. You have a low powered CPU and not a lot of RAM so it is going to take a long time. 4 GB RAM is barely enough, but your dual core CPU at 1.6 GHz is also going to slow you down. Unfortunately, there isn't much that you can do except wait.
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If the node is located physically closer to you than other nodes, then you will have a lower ping. There are simply less hops to make and less physical wire for the signal to travel through so there is less network latency. Otherwise, that node may simply have a faster internet connection and the connection between you and that node is faster than between you and other nodes.
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Can I do this even if I have an Armory client that won't start until I have downloaded a couple of gigs of Blockchain?
Yes. Just start Armory with the --offline option and it will be in offline mode. No blockchain or Bitcoin Core is necessary for offline mode to work. |
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You can restore a wallet from the root key and then generate and export the private keys from there to be imported into another wallet. However doing this requires you to know how many addresses that wallet used. Otherwise you may not receive all of your Bitcoin.
Start Armory in offline mode. Then use the "Import/Restore wallet" button and follow the wizard to restore the wallet. Once that is done, open the wallet properties and choose "Backup this wallet". Then choose the option "Export Key list" and you will get a list of all of your private keys from that wallet. Note that you may need to extend the wallet keypool or click the "Receive Bitcoin" button a lot of times in order to get all of the addresses you have used.
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Load them into what? What software are you using? How are you "loading" the Bitcoin? Do you have the private keys?
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