In 2013 i bought 25 bit coins and basically forgot about them. I stored my wallet on external usb's or so i thought, when i went to upgrade block chain on a new computer the wallet on the usb was not there. So i found my old laptop and booted up bit coin, the coins are there but are unverified, i must not have completed the block chain. I have been running the old qt version for a couple days now also have an outdated warning and to upgrade. so my questions are how to verify my coins? on the old qt, do i keep it running or upgrade to new core without verification. thanks for your time.
1 Answer
You should first create additional backups of the wallet.dat from your laptop, as we're now talking about a significant amount of value.
Your old version of Bitcoin-Qt should be able to catch up eventually, but there have been lots of improvements, especially including the speed of synchronization but also security. A newer version of Bitcoin-Qt (now Bitcoin Core) should be at least 10× faster in catching up.
To switch to a new version, simply shut Bitcoin-Qt down, install Bitcoin Core, then copy the wallet.dat to Bitcoin's folder. It'll discover the wallet when you open and continue the synchronization.
You may also want to consider running the program on your newer computer instead, if it's much faster, the last year saw a significant increase in Bitcoin transaction traffic, so the later blocks are significantly slower to verify than earlier ones. If you're not using the computer too much, and can afford to give Bitcoin more RAM (and have enough RAM), you can speed-up the synchronization by increasing it's RAM usage by upping it to e.g. 2GiB with -dbcache=2048.
If you just want to check whether the coins are still untouched, you could look up the address on a blockchain explorer, e.g. https://blockexplorer.com/address/<your-address-here>.
If you want to spend your coins immediately, you may want to look at:
In the long term, you may want to look into hardware wallets or paper wallets to store a large sum of bitcoins safely.
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Thank you for your reply, i have backed up my wallet again, can i import it into the new core in its current state of unverified? Commented Jan 9, 2017 at 15:51
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ok so downloaded the new version and copied wallet.dat into the bitcoin folder.it hasn't picked it up just synchronizing with the network no balances or transactions to show ?(.my old laptop running xp so didnt want to do it on there.) Commented Jan 9, 2017 at 16:25
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If you're starting from scratch, it may not have reached the point where it sees the transactions yet. It first has to get read 2009-2013 to get to them, right? :)– Murch ♦Commented Jan 9, 2017 at 16:29