I have a number of wallets. Is it possible to detect the type of (alternative) coin it contains?
Here's one way I found.
Get pywallet (https://github.com/jackjack-jj/pywallet) and run
python pywallet.py --dumpwallet --wallet=/foo/bar/wallet.dat
Look in the output for a field called names. This will contain a list of addresses in the coin's own format, and by looking at the first character you can try to identify the coin by its version byte. See here for a list of some common ones. For example, 1 is Bitcoin, L is Litecoin, etc.
Note that you will see a number of other fields named defaultkey, addr, etc. These will appear to be in Bitcoin address format (starting with 1), no matter what the actual coin is. The reason is that for these keys, the wallet.dat file only contains the private key, and pywallet has to do the conversion to the public key and address. In particular, pywallet has to fill in the version byte, and it always picks the Bitcoin version byte unless told otherwise on the command line. So you always get a Bitcoin-style address in these fields, so for purposes of identifying the coin, you should ignore them.
answered May 13 '14 at 17:30
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2i write a similar but much simpler script: gist.github.com/nlitsme/b3102191c2dc14c587e7. and look for 'name' in the output – Willem Hengeveld Jul 10 '14 at 10:36
look at the 'name' field mentioned by nate, here is a list of what addresses of several alt coins look like:
example address version coin
17DxjJ9Uf3nqMPAtcBMcs2wUdoUBnJit1V 00 bitcoin
9ZKdQaQXZqXEXV6i7zMK3fezrPszj9zErr 15 catcoin
XguoZYoNcm1RWKmUU4fqiZdGU93skcxKkn 4c darkcoin
DBN4GZ67xTh7tPMVLmMBQo75WwCV7ppTgD 1e dogecoin
LRSuzWTJji2tcBs3nKLv941Er1qTq9jMnW 30 litecoin
4KvncAXnLVVqtrHaoY2Ak37mfqXjPDzfCP 08 novacoin
PEp8tGYKhyH2LDqexFg9XvukFYe4ty6DMu 37 ppcoin
AMzqNo16zCSzAMNtAq1x1vCa7QPt8metCh 17 primecoin
mmjv2METU5E68VeWKkKzgx9oVo4thkSw5x 6f btccoin testnet
mmjv2METU5E68VeWKkKzgx9oVo4thkSw5x 6f litecoin testnet
version is the version byte prepended to the hash before base58 encoding it.
That is not possible because just looking at the file you can't say whats in there until you have saved these wallet.dat files in different folders second thing is you cannot read content of a .dat file. So its not possible.
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1I don't understand this answer. What does saving files in folders have to do with anything? And of course you can read the content of wallet.dat given the right tools to interpret it. It's just a question of whether and how that content contains the information you want. – Nate Eldredge May 13 '14 at 4:02
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A .da file cannot be read by a human that I know for sure, if you are familiar with a program which can do that please let me know – Khan Shahrukh May 13 '14 at 15:05
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