Hot swapping wallets?

[andrew]

Hello I have a few questions..

Is it possible to 'hot swap' wallets so that if I want to spend money from different wallets I can do it without stopping and starting the client?

If it is not possible yet would it be difficult to implement? How much of the client is connected to the wallet? and do other nodes know who someone is via their wallet? For example could I be tracked by where my wallet is being used to receive (not spend) coins?

[dete]

So far as the rest of the world is concerned, each address you generate is completely unique.  If you create two addresses, there's no way for anyone to connect the two of them (unless you transfer money between them a bunch of times).

There's no reason to swap wallets, and you run the risk of messing it up and losing coins...

[Insti]

So far as the rest of the world is concerned, each address you generate is completely unique.  If you create two addresses, there's no way for anyone to connect the two of them (unless you transfer money between them a bunch of times).

There's no reason to swap wallets, and you run the risk of messing it up and losing coins...

However there is currently also no way to control which address any payment you make comes from. So you could be unwittingly connecting "Grandmas  birthday money" to "Hot goat porn". Which could lead to some loss of anonymity.

But no, you cannot currently hot swap wallets.

[jgarzik]

There's no reason to swap wallets, and you run the risk of messing it up and losing coins...

There are plenty of reasons to swap wallets.  I can think of disaster recovery and de-centralization (non-SPOF) scenarios where you absolutely would want to move around wallets.

Here's hoping they will turn on db4's AES encryption for wallets, by default, too!