Running Two Wallets at the Same Time

[Crypto-t]

Thought I'd share this if others are trying to achieve it for demonstration purposes. The instructions are step-by-step and covered in more detail in the blog post.

With our next workshop planned for tomorrow, we wanted to show the attendees how to send GB Coins from one wallet to another live on the same computer (Windows), so I began experimenting to find a way to do this.

When you try to start a second instance (copy) of the same wallet you get this error: Cannot obtain a lock on data directory

And when you get past the above error, you get another error: Unable to bind (screenshot below).

After some testing we managed to get past both errors and get two working but separate wallets on-screen, with each wallet successfully sending coins to the other one

Source: http://blog.gbcoinfoundation.org/how-to-run-two-wallets-of-the-same-coin-at-the-same-time-on-the-same-computer/

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[Chris_Sabian]

Thought I'd share this if others are trying to achieve it for demonstration purposes. The instructions are step-by-step and covered in more detail in the blog post.

With our next workshop planned for tomorrow, we wanted to show the attendees how to send GB Coins from one wallet to another live on the same computer (Windows), so I began experimenting to find a way to do this.

When you try to start a second instance (copy) of the same wallet you get this error: Cannot obtain a lock on data directory

And when you get past the above error, you get another error: Unable to bind (screenshot below).

After some testing we managed to get past both errors and get two working but separate wallets on-screen, with each wallet successfully sending coins to the other one

Source: http://blog.gbcoinfoundation.org/how-to-run-two-wallets-of-the-same-coin-at-the-same-time-on-the-same-computer/

But why would you want to?

[Cryptogirl82]

I run about 5 wallets at the same time and have had no problems so far.

[sclaggett]

I have the same question as to what is the specific use case here for this application. 

[Yuki1988]

But why would you want to?

Maybe he has a personal wallet and a wallet for his business. Or maybe he has two separate businesses.

[hashman]

Thought I'd share this if others are trying to achieve it for demonstration purposes.

[bitkanu]

i think using of 2 wallet is wasting if you can store your  all money in single account but one thing i want clear you guys if you want to make multiple accounts and distribute all money into those account your money is much safer form hackers

[gagalady]

Two wallets or more are for different purpose let'sa say one for your business where you get alot of transactions and other one for personal use.Or just to separate your coin stack so It's safer and less attracting for hackers .

[digitalninja81]

Thanks for this info, but in my case one wallet is pretty much

[DocJeff]

Good info, but if your'e doing this for security that's a reallly bad idea.

Wallets stored locally on the same box may have different credentials, but realistically if one is compromised it's probably not because somebody figured out your RPC info (though it is possible.) Anyway, the point is the only reason I could think of doing this outside of security would be to give each person using a computer their own wallet, at which point honestly you should just use the "account" field

[etotheipi]

Armory has a multi-wallet interface precisely because it does support different security models.   Many users keep different wallets also for general organizational reasons, and I've heard that the bitcoind "accounts" are very ... awkward.

We spent a lot of time making the interface natively support multiple wallets, because having a single wallet doesn't meet the needs of most users -- you need to be able to manage "spending cash" (hot) and "savings" (cold) simultaneously, you can't just keep all your money in one or the other (you can, but it's not ideal).  Also, we use watching-only wallets to track employees payments.  For instance, here's why we hold multiple wallets:

• A hot wallet for day-to-day spending
• A watch-only wallet for an offline/cold laptop in the office
• A watch-only wallet for an offline/cold laptop in a safe-deposit box at a bank
• N watch-only wallets for each N employees, so we can pay them without requesting or reusing addresses.  Armory also has an export function to save the transaction history for each wallet to a CSV file for book-keeping.

The last one isn't limited to companies.  You and your friends can exchange watching-only wallets, and use them to pay each other.  It's automatic book-keeping, easy backup, and never re-uses addresses.

Trying to deal with multiple wallets in any other app is kind of a pain, and not all that useful unless you're using significantly different security profiles for each one.  I agree that if the private keys for multiple wallets are on the same hard-drive, they have essentially the same security profile (assuming they're both encrypted).

[wumpus]

Trying to deal with multiple wallets in any other app is kind of a pain, and not all that useful unless you're using significantly different security profiles for each one.  I agree that if the private keys for multiple wallets are on the same hard-drive, they have essentially the same security profile (assuming they're both encrypted).

Does armory support a RPC mechanism? Can it run headless?

Quite regularly I get requests for a server-side wallet solution that supports multiple wallets, and I have no idea which of the many wallet solutions works there.

[etotheipi]

Trying to deal with multiple wallets in any other app is kind of a pain, and not all that useful unless you're using significantly different security profiles for each one.  I agree that if the private keys for multiple wallets are on the same hard-drive, they have essentially the same security profile (assuming they're both encrypted).

Does armory support a RPC mechanism? Can it run headless?

Quite regularly I get requests for a server-side wallet solution that supports multiple wallets, and I have no idea which of the many wallet solutions works there.

armoryd.py is still somewhat minimal.  We followed bitcoin core's RPC interface as much as possible, which is a one-wallet interface, and we just haven't had time to update it to handle multiple wallets.  It actually would be quite easy -- just register mulitple wallets at startup instead of one, and then add some RPC commands to switch the "active" wallet.  In fact, I think some people using armoryd have essentially modified it in this way.  It's just not officially supported yet.

[elavenil]

What is wrong with having one wallet and multiple address?