I have old wallet.dat files that I cannot bring to my online machine due to fears of being compromised by
trojans from mining software.
1.) If I download the latest blockchain with an empty wallet.dat, take my machine offline, and replace wallet.dat with my old one having bitcoins on it, should it show the correct balance?
2.) I already risked a wallet with 7.5 bitcoins on it. I cut connection as soon as I noticed it, noted the only two addresses I had in "Receive" tab (Bitcoin-qt 0.8.1 for Windows), and checked blockchain.info for those two addresses. The final balance of blockchain.info for both addresses shows nearly zero, while in bitcoin-qt with 2 days old blockchain it showed 7.5+ btc. There are no transactions this year for either of the addresses at blockchain.com Is the final balance supposed to show the same balance as bitcoin-qt wallet.dat? Please explain where the obvious discrepancy could arise from.
[EDIT: For part 2. I just read an explanation from Bitcoin 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. Confusing indeed, what a mess. I hope method 1. would be viable for knowing the up-to-date balance securely, anyone objecting?]
