Merging Wallets

[bitcoindirect]

Alright so while working I use to be on faucets a year plus back.  I had a wallet address on my laptop for faucets, and a seperate main wallet for my mining and purchasing on my desktop.  How can I go ahead and merge the two.  For some reason nothing happens when I drag it onto blockchain, and when I try to send the smaller one to the desktop wallet, I guess it's too many small transactions.  Is there anyway to merge the two easily?  I heard of that python program, but to be honest I have no clue on how to do that.

Thanks for any help you may be able to offer!

[PYneer]

Maybe you can send some coins into the smaller wallet and then send from that wallet to your main wallet?

[Sonny]

The easiest way would be to export the private keys of one wallet and import them to another.

Which wallet are you using now? Bitcoin-qt? Multibit? Electrum?

[bitcoindirect]

Bitcoin QT is the wallet I have setup for that wallet file.  How could I go about exporting them?  It's obviously ALOT of little small transactions

[Sonny]

Bitcoin QT is the wallet I have setup for that wallet file.  How could I go about exporting them?

Click Help -> Debug Window -> Console
If you have password-protect your wallet, enter "walletpassphrase <passphrase> <timeout>".

To export private key of a address, enter "dumpprivkey <bitcoinaddress>"
To import a private key, enter "importprivkey <bitcoinprivkey>"

Please note that, anyone having your private keys will be able to spend your bitcoin, so you should NEVER post it.

[bitcoindirect]

I would have to do that for every single transaction thou right?

[pontiacg5]

Don't do it, you probably won't like the results.

Dust is a liability, as you've already found. Moving it to your other wallet doesn't do anything, it will still cost more to spend than it's worth. You did good to keep them separate, you should keep them that way till the dust is no loner dust.

But you probably only had one payout address from the faucets, at least hopefully. You only need to export unique addresses you made that had coins sent to them.

The number of inputs are what makes the dust impossible to spend.

[bitcoindirect]

Yea it's basically one payout address, just a whole bunch of inputs coming into it.  So what are you suggesting for that?  Thanks!

[pontiacg5]

Yea it's basically one payout address, just a whole bunch of inputs coming into it.  So what are you suggesting for that?  Thanks!

It only takes one private key to spend any of those individual dust outputs, so what I would do is just export the private key and keep it safe somewhere. Hopefully, sometime in the future, bitcoin will become more valuable than it is now. That will drive the fee per kilobite of transaction data down, so you ought to be able to spend the "dust" in the future. The problem here is all the tiny outputs from the faucets, they add up to lots of kilobytes of data as inputs to a new transaction. You can try and send those coins without a fee, but that is a non-standard transaction so it likely won't ever be valid.

Time will also decrease the required fee, but that's more complicated than I'm prepared to explain. 

If you merge the wallets your client may try and spend those tiny outputs, griping about fees the whole time.

[Sonny]

Dust is a liability, as you've already found.

True.

So, people should really use a deposit address of exchanges/gambling sites to collect all those dusts, and send it to their own wallet, when the balance grows to a significant amount.