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Hello Onkel Paul, Thanks for your reply. OK, I bit the bullet and set the Bitcoin wallet transaction fee to 0.01 and the SEND amount to 0.04. I then hit send and a few seconds later the 0.04 bitcoins showed up in my Electrum wallet. Electrum says the transaction is "Pending" so I guess that means the transaction is getting confirmed by various miners? Is that true? Is my understanding correct? Update: The transaction now has one confirmation so it looks like everything went OK. About how many confirmations will it get? Thanks, Advait It is possible that your old bitcoin client might be not working correctly right now because there have been some changes in the blockchain which it probably can't handle properly.
But a new version of the bitcoin-qt client should be just as able to work with your wallet as the old one.
In any case, you should make sure that your old wallet.dat is copied to a safe place, i.e. a place where it can neither become lost nor be stolen.
Wallet.dat contains the private key for the address in which your 0.05 bitcoins are held, so you need that file to spent those bitcoins or part of them.
After saving the file, you should install the newest bitcoin-qt. It should find your wallet.dat and is hopefully able to read it.
Now comes the hard part: If you did not use bitcoin for 4 years, your bitcoin client will need quite some time to catch up on the blockchain (I presume you have enough free disk space for the blockchain database).
You might be better off with a fresh download of the blockchain (it's available as a torrent, you should look at the official bitcoin websites for a pointer so you don't fall for some bad stuff).
You can only spend coins from the wallet when the client has been synchronized, because it needs to know whether the amount has been spent before.
Overall, it might be a time-saver to export your private keys from the old wallet.dat and import them into electrum, then you would see the balance immediately and did not have to wait for the download. However, I don't know anything about how you'd do that with electrum, I just suppose that it's possible. Of course, doing that means that you would not experience how sending and receiving bitcoins works in practice, so the other option might be preferrable even if it is painful :-)
Onkel Paul
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OK, I followed the steps, entered in 0.001 bitcoin to send, then clicked Send and got an error message saying "Error in Amount". Any way to fix this? I'm scared to transfer the full amount for fear of losing the 0.05 bitcoins.
Thanks,
Advait
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OK, I followed the steps, clicked Send and got an error message saying "Error in Amount". Any way to fix this? I'm scared to transfer the full amount for fear of losing the 0.05 bitcoins.
Thanks,
Advait
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Hi All,
Back in 2011 I got 0.05 bitcoin for installing the Bitcoin wallet (version 0.3.20.1 BETA) on my Win 7 laptop. I recently installed Electrum on my laptop. So I want to now learn how to play around with bitcoin.
I want to transfer say 0.001 bitcoin from my old Bitcoin wallet to my fancy new Electrum wallet. It looks like all I need to do is the following steps:
* Make sure my laptop is connected to the internet.
* Click on SEND on my old Bitcoin wallet.
* Copy and paste one of the Receiving addresses listed in my Electrum wallet.
* Enter in Amount, From and Message fields.
* Click Send
--- Then the 0.001 bitcoin goes out to the internet and comes back to my Electrum wallet and appears in the Balance column of the correct Receiving address.
Is it really that easy? Or am I missing something?
How long should it take before it appears in my Electrum wallet? Does the transfer happen only after my transfer request is confirmed in the blockchain?
Thanks for helping a newbie,
Advait
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use bitcoin core or multibit, they are very simple to use, the second is better for newbie as you don't need to sync the whole blockchain
I went with Electrum cause MultiBit (if i remember correctly) requires Java and Java has a lot of security issues. I got rid of Java years ago. I'm using Win7. you can download the blockchain, and use core, for security use a pendrive, for cold storage, unless you want to sign offline transaction, eletrucm and armory aren't really needed I think the blockchain is currently something like 25GB? That sound right? Here is India bandwidth is too expensive for that. Also not enough room on my hard drive. But I've got a stack of old 3.5" floppies; that may work...  |
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use bitcoin core or multibit, they are very simple to use, the second is better for newbie as you don't need to sync the whole blockchain
I went with Electrum cause MultiBit (if i remember correctly) requires Java and Java has a lot of security issues. I got rid of Java years ago. I'm using Win7. |
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Electrum is an awesome choice. I am not sure I understand what you mean by "safely hide all the complexities of Change Addresses", but electrum has an option to enable/disable change addresses. With respect to backing up data, you don't need to worry. You just need to note down the 12 word seed. Back that up in as many ways as you see fit.  My understanding is that disabling Change Addresses reduces privacy and I would like to maintain privacy. From what I read it also seems that I have to really understand Change Addresses and use them correctly otherwise I could easily lose my bitcoin. So as a newbie I was just wondering if some wallets keep the good features of Change Addresses but hide the complexity. Any insights on this would be appreciated. Thanks! And I'll read thru the Electrum documentation some more. Kinda complicated! But I like a challenge. I may get a Coinbase account and play around with their wallet to see how it compares. Cheers, Advait |
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Hi All, I installed Electrum on my Win 7 pc and I'm now trying to learn how to use it properly. I'm a newbie now digging into bitcoin details. Wow. It's a little more complicated than I expected. I'm now trying to wrap my head around things like Change Addresses and related topics. Not easy for a newb like me. But I like learning new things. Are there wallets keychains that successfully and safely hide all the complexities of Change Addresses without putting coins at risk? Or, to put it another way, what is the best wallet for total techno-phobic newbies who are allergic to any technical details? Is something like the Coinbase online wallet best for total non-geek newbies? Does the Coinbase wallet successfully and safely hide all Change Address and other complexity? Thanks, Advait PS: I'm a fanatic about backing up my important data in multiple ways. PPS: I'm also reading thru the posts at http://bitzuma.com/posts/a-beginners-guide-to-the-electrum-bitcoin-wallet/. There's a lot to learn! |
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Hello shorena,
Thanks for the reply. One reason I was nervous is that near the end of my default_wallet text is "mpk" followed by some random characters. I translated "mpk" as Master Private Key (I could be totally wrong. What is "mpk" anyway?).
And I'm guessing the actual Master Private Key will also just be a string of random characters. So I have no way of telling if the characters after "mpk" are encrypted or not. You're saying they are so I can rest easy.
Thanks for helping a newbie. Cheers,
Advait
PS: And I promise cross-my-heart to do lots of regular backups of my wallets. :-)
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The fees goes to the miners(They help you confirm your tx for the fees you paid) and not to electrum.
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OK, thanks. So this fee is voluntary?
Default fee is .0002 BTC per kb of transaction. How many kb in a typical transaction? .0001 kb? or 10,000 kb? I need to know how much I'll be donating.
Thanks for helping a newbie. Cheers,
Advait
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Hi All,
Newbie here. I just installed Electrum on my Win 7 Pro pc. I navigated to the "default_wallet" file and used Notepad to open it and (as near as I can tell) it is totally *not* encrypted. I could read the contents just fine. I saw obvious plain text.
WTF!? Is this a problem? Or am I missing something? Thanks for helping a newbie.
I followed the default install instructions and created a strong password when I installed Electrum.
Cheers,
Advait
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Looks ok, pretty simple and straight forward.
In the Electrum "Preferences" it says the default transaction fee is .000002 BTC or something like that. What is this transaction fee? I'm guessing its a just a way of automatically donating to Electrum when I make transactions? That correct?
Also, how do I mark a thread as "solved"?
Thanks,
Advait
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Hi Everyone,
Thanks for the replies. Per your suggestions, I downloaded and installed Electrum. So far so good.
Cheers,
Advait
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Hi All,
Newbie here. I want to install a wallet on my Win7 Pro pc. I was doing some research and from what I can understand some wallets require that you download the whole blockchain and some don't. I have very limited bandwidth so I definitely don't want to download the whole thing.
I googled "Comparison of wallets for Windows" but didn't find anything useful.
Which Windows wallet is best that does not require the whole blockchain to be downloaded?
I also have an Android phone (5.0.1) so if you think the Android wallets are much better let me know.
Thanks for helping a newbie. Cheers,
Advait
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