Hi everyone,
Sorry if this has already been covered, I've just spent an hour reading other threads about cold storage and couldn't find any that answered my question, but there might be one out there.
I've just finished setting up some cold storage, I've got a bunch of encrypted USB sticks with my wallet on them, and also a "failsafe" paper printout of my private key (the wallet only has one payment address in it), which will be stored somewhere safe. However, I came across this in the wiki:
The situation is made somewhat more confusing because the receiving addresses shown in the UI are not the only keys in your wallet. Each Bitcoin generation is given a new public key, and, more importantly, each sent transaction also sends some number of Bitcoins back to yourself at a new key. When sending Bitcoins to anyone, you generate a new keypair for yourself and simultaneously send Bitcoins to your new public key and the actual recipient's public key. This is an anonymity feature – it makes tracking Bitcoin transactions much more difficult.
So this being the case, does this mean that if I in future move any funds out of cold storage, I need to back up my wallet again? Does this also mean that my paper printout of my private key is not enough? Are there any Bitcoin clients which don't have this anonymity feature, and therefore the one private key is sufficient?
And finally, I know the answer is probably no, but I just want to make sure. To make sure that my cold storage works, I was going to send a small quantity of coins to it. Then create a new temporary wallet, import my private key, double-check the funds are there, and then destroy the temporary wallet. Does the process of importing a private key do anything weird like creating new addresses or distributing funds to other addresses for anonymity? I know that question is rather stupid, but I just want to make sure!
Thanks
Spec