The most "newbie" you can imagine - some questions...

[mwr]

I thought I'd check in to say that bitcoin now shows "4 weeks behind", much better than the almost-500 weeks it started with. So it will be finishing any day now :-)

What should I do after it finishes synching to find out if I have any bitcoins, and if so to redeem them for $US? Remember, I have the original wallet.dat file saved.

[1715282424]

1715282424

[DannyHamilton]

I thought I'd check in to say that bitcoin now shows "4 weeks behind", much better than the almost-500 weeks it started with. So it will be finishing any day now :-)

What should I do after it finishes synching to find out if I have any bitcoins, and if so to redeem them for $US? Remember, I have the original wallet.dat file saved.

If you're just trying to find out if the wallet has and bitcoins and immediately sell them for U.S. dollars if you do, it might have been faster/easier to just try importing the wallet.dat file into a blockchain.info wallet:

https://blockchain.info/wallet/import-wallet

[mwr]

Well, that's not the path I chose. So I'm looking for what to do after the bitcoin sync finishes.

Or is the blockchain method a better one, aside from being faster?

If you're just trying to find out if the wallet has and bitcoins and immediately sell them for U.S. dollars if you do, it might have been faster/easier to just try importing the wallet.dat file into a blockchain.info wallet:

https://blockchain.info/wallet/import-wallet

[BurtW]

Can't wait to see the results!

[DannyHamilton]

Well, that's not the path I chose. So I'm looking for what to do after the bitcoin sync finishes.

When the sync is done, shut down Bitcon-Qt.

Find the data directory for your operating system:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory

This is where the current wallet.dat is located.

Remove the current wallet.dat from that data directory, and replace it with your backup of wallet.dat.

Start Bitcoin-Qt back up.  It will scan through the blockchain that you've downloaded and search for any unspent outputs to addresses in the wallet.dat that you just installed.  Depending on how fast your computer is, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours.

Bitcoin-Qt should then display your old bitcoin addresses in the "Receive" section and show the entire balance of bitcoins that you can access with that wallet.dat.

Or is the blockchain method a better one, aside from being faster?

I guess that depends on what you mean by "better".  It is certainly faster and easier (seconds or minutes instead of hours or days) .  It's possibly slightly less secure, but not enough less that I'd be worried about it.

[Coalbytes]

Watching this thread closely! As for your question about redeeming them for USD, you should have no issue selling them for market value over at Coinbase, however I'm pretty new here so more experienced users may have a better suggestion.

[mwr]

OK, another question. My bitcoin sync message was down to "2 days behind" earlier today. I left for about two hours, with bitcoin running, and when I came back it said "7 days behind". Is that just  how it works? Or?

[mwr]

Bitcoin finished the sync. I renamed the "live" wallet.dat file, then put the saved wallet.dat file in its place. Then started bitcoin. What happened is that it kept displaying the bitcoin splash screen, with "verifying blocks" at the bottom. That went on for several minutes so I restarted the computer, then against started bitcoin. The same thing is happening. Shouldn't that splash screen go away, leaving the bitcoin window displayed?

Bitcoin is using about 20% of the CPU (task manager). In fact, if I put something over the splash screen (like this page), then move it away, the area that was the splash screen contains the prior page that was in that location. it's been 15 minutes now this last time.

[mwr]

It finally stopped that splash-screen thing and displayed the bitcoin-wallet window. But it says Balance: 0.00 BTC and Unconfirmed: 0.00 BTC. That means that I didn't actually complete a bitcoin purchase before, right?

The tooltip for the green check mark at the bottom right says "Up to date. Processed 267613 blocks of transaction history."

Anything else to try?

[BurtW]

Darn, I was hoping for a large cache of coins.

[mwr]

No more than I was :-)

Darn, I was hoping for a large cache of coins.