How does one import private keys? (Was: Concerned about Electrum)

[FTL_Ian]

So, I have a friend who wants to use Bitcoin, but does not have enough space for the ginormous blockchain.  I have installed Electrum, but have some concerns:

Electrum does not appear to use wallet.dat.  I have tried renaming my unencrypted electrum.dat to wallet.dat and using it with the Satoshi client, but that failed.  If the electrum servers stop working, how would I be able to move my Electrum wallet to a Satoshi client, or is this impossible?  

If that is impossible, doesn't that mean that I'm held hostage by the electrum client - that it will only be useful as long as its servers stay online?

Thanks for any understanding you can offer.

[flatfly]

So, I have a friend who wants to use Bitcoin, but does not have enough space for the ginormous blockchain.  I have installed Electrum, but have some concerns:

Electrum does not appear to use wallet.dat.  I have tried renaming my unencrypted electrum.dat to wallet.dat and using it with the Satoshi client, but that failed.  If the electrum servers stop working, how would I be able to move my Electrum wallet to a Satoshi client, or is this impossible?  

If need be, you can very easily export all of your electrum addresses in WIF format (which can easily be imported into the Bitcoin-Qt client, or other clients with WIF support) using the following command:
 electrum -ak addresses

If that is impossible, doesn't that mean that I'm held hostage by the electrum client - that it will only be useful as long as its servers stay online?

Thanks for any understanding you can offer.

Servers are open source as well and anyone can set one up relatively easily. There is no "central" server or single point of failure.

[FTL_Ian]

If need be, you can very easily export all of your electrum addresses in WIF format (which can easily be imported into the Bitcoin-Qt client, or other clients with WIF support) using the following command:
 electrum -ak addresses

To where does that export them?  It seems to just display them.  How does one go from this command to having a wallet.dat?  Is this documented anywhere?

Thanks and sorry for my ignorance.

[prezbo]

If need be, you can very easily export all of your electrum addresses in WIF format (which can easily be imported into the Bitcoin-Qt client, or other clients with WIF support) using the following command:
 electrum -ak addresses

To where does that export them?  It seems to just display them.  How does one go from this command to having a wallet.dat?  Is this documented anywhere?

Thanks and sorry for my ignorance.

You can copy them and import them into whatever other software you would like to use, pretty much everything supports importing private keys. (Specifically, you can import a private key to bitcoin-qt using the importprivkey command line call)

[FTL_Ian]

running bitcoind with -importprivkey followed by the key, does not work.  Apparently it's a little more complicated.  I've tried setting up the .conf then running bitcoind with the rpcuser and pass commands followed by importprivkey and I get "error: couldn't connect to server".

I'm probably missing something obvious?

How does one use "importprivkey"?

[FTL_Ian]

I think I'm getting somewhere... ran bitcoinqt -server then ran bitcoind importprivkey [key]

Error adding key to wallet


sounds like progress..

[FTL_Ian]

Apparently - it was already added.  However, the bitcoins that should be there aren't showing in the total.

[Raoul Duke]

no need to run it as a server. Use the RPC console on the Debug Window.

If bitcoins are missing do a rescan.

[FTL_Ian]

Might help if I were using the current version that actually has the debug window.   

[Raoul Duke]

Might help if I were using the current version that actually has the debug window.   

Your loss.

[FTL_Ian]

no need to run it as a server. Use the RPC console on the Debug Window.

If bitcoins are missing do a rescan.

Got the new version did a rescan - problem solved.  Thanks!