My last back up of wallet.dat was from the beginning of the year. My computer crashed recently and I don't have the most recent wallet.dat after receiving bitcoins. If I use my outdated wallet.dat, do I lose the new bitcoins I received?
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2 Answers
If you made more than 100 transactions and individual receiving addresses combined, yes.
Best way to find out is to try.
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1To explain the '100': With standard settings bitcoin-qt keeps 100 unused addresses available at all times. Whenever an address is used, another new is generated. If you create back-ups only very irregularly, you can run the client with e.g.
-keypool=10000, to have more unused addresses in your wallet, which would make your backup useful for a longer time.– Murch ♦Commented Oct 3, 2013 at 14:39
Unfortunately you are right. If you run out of addresses (100 in the pool) Bitcoin-qt would have generated new addresses and those are not in that old backup, so you don't have the newly created private keys then you can't access the coins on them.
You better start using a deterministic wallet, like Electrum or Armory, if you don't have set up a good (automatic) backup process.
