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I've been using Bitcoin Qt on my work computer (my only working computer at the moment) but last week Windows 7 decided that the program's bypassing the firewall to download the blockchain was a security risk and blocked it from doing so. I'm not the network administrator and fiddling with the firewall settings I can access hasn't done anything. While it is absolutely possible that I am missing some obvious solution, I've given up on fixing this. what I'd like to do now is download another offline wallet - one that does not need the entire blockchain - and import my Qt backup. I've tried MultiBit & Electrum, neither of which seem to work (although, again, it is possible that I'm missing something). Is there another program I can use? Should I wait until my laptop is fixed and just re-install BTC Qt on that? Am I out of luck?

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  • fyi: Using the default (or semi-default) settings, when Windows 7 blocks Bitcoin-qt it will still be able to download the blockchain.
    – Tom van der Woerdt
    Apr 22, 2013 at 19:51
  • @Tom van der Woerdt: But it won't sync. It says “0 active connections to bitcoin network.”
    – cyrana
    Apr 22, 2013 at 20:10
  • see bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2300/…. - based on the info given by Gary Rowe, Multibit should support wallet.dat imports, although I couldn't find any evidence of this on their site. When I switched to Electrum, I dumped my old wallet using pywallet and then copied the relevant private keys over(only like 5 of them had any balance, and they were all labelled which made them easier to locate). If you choose an online wallet, I believe most of them can import using the pasted output of pywallet.py -dumpwallet.
    – 7anner
    Apr 23, 2013 at 1:02

2 Answers 2

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You can use PyWallet, a simple tool for exporting wallet.dat files, to retrieve the private keys for your wallet addresses.

Most wallets nowadays can import private keys, which give direct access to all the funds in your backed up wallet.

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  • I'm not sure how to use PyWallet, but it looks like the perfect solution. I'll try it and see.
    – cyrana
    Apr 26, 2013 at 21:21
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Any PC that can run any software that would be able to import wallet.dat can surely also run bitcoind. You do not need to download the blockchain, not even to have a network connection.

1) Put wallet.dat in a proper folder and run bitcoind.

2) Then use another console to do:

bitcoind walletpassphrase password 3600

3) and then you can just export any of the keys you need, using:

bitcoind dumpprivkey publicaddr

If you don't have any password over your wallet, just skip point 2.

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  • What does the 36000 do? (yes I'm too lazy to look it up :P. Didn't think importing wallet.dat would take more than 5 min. Turns out I was very, very wrong!)
    – turbo
    Jul 19, 2014 at 22:16

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