You can look at the transaction and see exactly what happened, and what Bitcoin Address the nester is in. Greg Bitcoin 3, 8 I use that quite often to check on the transaction's status in the network. Wallets intended for experimentation and learning benefit little from encryption. This principle underlies cold storagea system for protecting bitcoin that is far more secure than the one described here. For instance, wallet you have 10 Empty in your wallet and the fee is 0.
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Now, enjoy life in France. This text is unlicensed. First, there's no such thing as a "change address" really. And you can "mistype" a few characters and the code still works because it has some redundant information stored in it. Does it retransfer the bitcoin back to your original address?
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Why is adding "o"s into "so" empty it more obvious of empty sarcastic you sound, let alone using the word "so"? This wallet the Install Nester. There nester be a option for change address where uou can bitcoin what address to send the funds back to your paper wallet instead of creating a new one. Obviously the code is not going to rewrite itself - if you wallet in the latest code transactions track the peers bitcoin have been seen by. Access it by clicking on the circle to the lower right of the main window.
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If you have a fairly powerful computer that is almost always online, you can help the network by running Bitcoin Core. You can also use Bitcoin Core as a very secure Bitcoin wallet. Check out his other work here.
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Using paper wallets, understanding change addresses. Paper wallets are a handy little store of a private key offline. Unfortunately, many people seem to misunderstand one of the fundamentals of how they work, and subsequently lose vast amounts of money. Storage in a paper wallet is completely safe, retrieving the funds from one is less so. In typical use, a paper wallet would be retrieved into a client using the importprivkey command, and from there it should be assumed at the paper wallet is completely useless.
From the moment the first transaction is made, the paper wallet is empty, this is due to the way to the way that the client handles change. Let's imagine that I send the full contents of my paper wallet 5BTC to a new address, once I have imported it to bitcoin-qt. This is the expected behaviour, my paper wallet now contains 0 bitcoin, and the receiving address contains 5BTC. Unfortunately this isn't how bitcoin works. There is now nothing in my paper wallet, and 4BTC has been moved to a new "change" address.
If you wish to keep this amount in an offline address than, you must create a new paper wallet for this change. The mistake people have made in the past is to import a paper wallet with BTC in it, spend one or two, and then assume that the paper wallet still holds 98BTC.
This situation is only an issue if you reimport a wallet and expect the funds to remain on it. This issue doesn't apply if you are using your wallet normally. Too many people don't know about or understand change addresses.
This needs to be changed. There is also a reverse example. This huge mistake is made by many people when they have been using a client like bitcoin-qt for a while, and decide to make a paper wallet using only the primary address from bitcoin-qt. In that case, they believe that they are putting the entire bitcoin-qt wallet balance into a paper wallet. All the change addresses hidden to the user in bitcoin-qt will not go into the paper wallet.
Then a crash occurs, or whatever. User imports from paper wallet. Wonders why balance is so much less than what they had.
It's because the change addresses weren't included. In both your case and in OP's case, a lot of angst and worry can be avoided simply by verifying the account balance online, to make sure the money went where you wanted it to go. You should do this anytime you are about to destroy a wallet or private key. If you think all your money is in 1PaperWalletVt23Ljhdfjsda, simply check it online.
I think the point that OP was making and definitely the point in mine , was directed towards people who do not understand wallets and addresses that much, or at least are not confident in their understanding of them. Many of them are not even aware of what blockhain. I think people are also reluctant to key in theit Bitcoin Address, as if that's giving up part of the secret. On the contrary, if there's money in it, everyone knows it. So feel free to check it online. Just don't key in your private address!
Total noob here can you clarify this statement? I currently use blockchain. However, if you use paper wallets go to www. So, say, if you send money to the Bitcoin Address on a paper wallet.
Now the money is in that account. You can verify it by going to blockchain. Note that the Bitcoin address starts with a "1", while the private key on bitaddress. Anytime you expose the "5" number on the internet by "importing private key" function , you probably want to spend the money in that account, unless you are super careful or trusting.
I also made a little thing for this specific purpose to cut through some of the clutter elsewhere. Thats what I do, blockchain. Although I was not aware that moving a portion of BTC out of my paper wallets wasn't a thing.
My question is if I wanted to use the QR code to spend say 0. Or should I just plan on trasfering the whole amount into my spending wallet then moving the portion I don't want to spend onto a new paper wallet.
The later was my initial plan, though the constant flow of new information changes my mind for me every few minutes! Say you have 10 BTC on a paper wallet, and you want to spend say 0. You could import the paper wallet into blockchain. But then the change may be in a separate wallet. You can look at the transaction and see exactly what happened, and what Bitcoin Address the money is in. My preference at this point is to then pay the remainder to another paper wallet, and verify that it got there, then destroy the first paper wallet.
In fact, I would do this in a disposable blockchain. Once the money is where I want it to be, then you can burn the old paper wallet with the zero balance. Just make sure no one sends you money to that bitcoin address ever again.
Just do I don't have to deal with finding the change wallet! So if I want everything to nicely fit in one address I would just send my whole wallet value to a new address? This would allow me to eliminate change addresses? If i make a paper wallet, and send a fraction of the btc to another address, the left over change the majority of the paper wallet address get sent to a new address??
Normally your client transparently handles the change addresses, you don't need to know about them unless you are using a paper wallet in this manner. The change address is generated and controlled by your client, be it Bitcoin-QT or Electrum or Multibit. It can, but doing so exposes more information to the blockchain. If you do this you essentially publish your bank statements to the world.
If you generate a new change address every time others can only guess which ones you own and which belong to others, so this is the default behavior. I've heard that some clients allow you to choose to send change back to the origin address via a setting, but the standard client does not allow this. Another concern is that once you have imported your paper address key into a client it isn't "paper secure" any more unless you very carefully destroy every electronic copy of the private key, including any cached copies or swap space it might have landed in.
This is not easy to do, and is easy to goof up. Your most secure option is probably to just create a new paper address for each transaction or grab one from a stack of empty ones you made ahead of time and send your "change" there. This needs to change. I am in the bitcoin game for a year now, and sometimes I just can't comprehend some of the operations that should have been pretty straightforward. I think this is more of a problem than the wildly fluctuating value of bitcoin.
Armory uses what it calls "deterministic wallets" where if I'm reading the docs right; I haven't tried this all copies of the wallet will generate the same addresses. If I've got it right, this means that both "change" addresses and addresses you generate yourself by clicking "new address" are safe to use, even if you're using a paper wallet on a LiveCD with no storage. That gets you the best of both worlds.
By handles what exactly do you mean? Does it retransfer the bitcoin back to your original address? Most software clients bitcoinqt, multibit, etc use an address you haven't used yet or generate a new one, AFAIK. The paper wallet is now empty, but you still control your BTC.
The real PSA should be quite simple: To spend a paper wallet you need to import its public private key. You've now exposed your paper wallet's key to the digital world. Destroy the paper and make good backups until you've transferred any funds you wish to cold-store back to a new paper wallet. The reason that paper wallets are in this story, is just that it's often there the trouble starts. This is how some bitcoin wallets work. It's not fundamental to the protocol. You can always use something like http: Make certain the sender you are using generates a transaction sending the leftovers back to your wallet!
If it doesn't, the leftover coins will be collected by the miners instead! Any input bitcoins not redeemed in an output is considered a transaction fee; whoever generates the block will get it. Please use deterministic wallets like Armory ones, you just print on paper the seed codes and all your addresses are generated in order, forever, so you only do one backup per wallet per life.
And you can "mistype" a few characters and the code still works because it has some redundant information stored in it. They're randomly created in your computer, so they have the full entropy and not just a dumb phrase.
Armory allows you to create the wallet in an offline computer and then import a watch-only code on an online PC, so the online pc can only generate your public keys so you can receive money , but the private master code is only on the offline PC and in the paper backup.
Seriously, give Armory a try. If bitcoin wants to become more widespread and actually used by the public at large, wallet clients and such will need to simplify and idiot-proof the process more than it currently is.
TL;DR When you come to use your paper wallet, empty it all into your live wallet then put the stuff you want kept safe into a new paper wallet. I've been seeing these posts about wallets here ever since I started trading on Bitstamp just yesterday.
I have a few questions about them. What exactly are they used for? Right now I just have my Bitcoins sitting in my Bitstamp account, should I be transfering them to my Bitcoin-qt wallet?
Is it safer that way? I'm guessing you have to put them into the wallet if you want to buy something using Bitcoins? Sorry if this is a stupid question. It's just that I'm seeing a lot of posts about people encrypting their wallets, backing them up on cloud storage and so on. Just wondering if I am doing something wrong here.
By leaving them in your Bitstamp account, you are trusting that company. A lot of things can and have gone wrong with this sort of trust arrangement.
In the past, places have shut down because the trusted person was a crook. They've also been shut down because they were robbed, and their security was lax and YOU are the one out the coins. They have been shut down due to business circumstances old Tradehill got nailed with huge chargebacks, and had to close their doors. They also have been regulated out of business. So, yeah, if you are more comfortable with that risk, you're fine.
But the key feature of Bitcoin is that you don't need to trust other people. Be your own bank! Of course, the flip side is that if you have your own wallet on your computer, you are then trusting your drive not to fail, trusting your own computer's security, and hopefully trusting your self to remember to make regular backups. Oh yea, I guess I just never thought about it that way. Guess I'm going to keep the money on Bitstamp for now and keep trading, then set aside some Bitcoins and send them to my wallet.
Let's imagine that I send the full contents of my wallet 5BTC to a new address, once I have imported it to bitcoin-qt. This is the expected behaviour, my paper wallet now contains 0 bitcoin, and the receiving address contains nothing. Shouldn't the last word from what I quoted say '5BTC', and not 'nothing'?
When I generated a paper wallet, I actually made a couple sheets worth of addresses. That way, I can use each one a single time. Then when I'm done, just send the change back to the next address and cross the first one off.
Not much hassle that way. It should be pointed out that this is not "how bitcoin works" as a protocol, but how bitcoin-qt has decided to work as a client. Multi-bit currently seems to be returning it's change back to the original address as opposed to making new change addresses. This raises some security concerns in exchange for easing key management for the user. It is more likely your coins could be stolen once the public key to them has been revealed via you spending some portion of the coins in that address if computing power drastically increases or there is some other failure in the implementation as recently seen with the android wallets.
By creating change addresses for every transaction the unspent funds are placed in a new address where the public key has not been announced to the blockchain. Maybe it's because I'm on my phone but I really don't understand what you're saying. If I our my whole balance in a pair wallet and then import the private key to say blockchain and send money around then some of it will go missing?
End how do I access these funds? Is there a way to generate the plaintext change address' priv key to make a new paper wallet then? Let's say I'm using Bitcoin-QT for this example. You could export the particular private key print it to a paper wallet, but you still need to make sure you securely delete the key from the computer. Easier just to print a new paper wallet and transfer coins to that afterwards.
I know it is not the default action of the software, but say you import your address with 5 BTC and spend your 1 BTC, bitcoin-qt or whatever will show you with a 4BTC balance, but it is actually in a new "change" address, correct? Could you then do another transaction where you send 4 BTC to the paper address? The software will show no change in balance, but the coins should be back on the paper wallet, right?
Or am I missing something? Just bear in mind that the paper wallet has now been on an online computer, and it is remotely possible that it could have been stolen by malware the point of a paper wallet is to stop this. One of the main points of paper wallets is cold storage - the private key has never had a chance of being stolen. Moral of the story: You can also set up transactions so the change is sent back to the original address.
Since it was a new install the blockchain is still updating not finished as of this post. I searched my address at blockchain.
With that being said, are my efforts at recovering the wallet pointless? The entire directory is intact and the block that was processed is still in the directory as well, about MB big. Not sure if that helps me at all in this case.
Here'e the pywallet dump with critical data removed. The fact that there is nothing under tx makes me believe that I'm wasting my time. It's worth keeping in mind that your "wallet" doesn't actually contain any bitcoins. What your wallet contains is the private keys that permit you to spend coins that have been sent to any of your addresses.
Which addresses have been sent coins is a matter of public record the blockchain. If you had previously received or mined coins using one or more of your addresses that are contained in that wallet, then the record of those transactions will still exist.
Note that your wallet likely contains more than one address, particularly if you've used it for anything at all. The address you have shown in your question has not received any coins. If you have copied your old wallet. Your client won't know about any coins that have been sent to the addresses in your wallet without actually seeing the whole blockchain. By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service. Questions Tags Users Badges Unanswered. Bitcoin Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Bitcoin crypto-currency enthusiasts.
Join them; it only takes a minute: Here's how it works: Anybody can ask a question Anybody can answer The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Found my old wallet, is it empty?