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Are there any easy way to prune wallet.dat? Like, deleting keys for addresses with no current balance and generated more than a month ago?

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Old addresses associated in the wallet will not cause harm. Is there any specific reason you want to do this other than cleaning up the addresses associated in your wallet? I would leave them where they are as you will normally always need new addresses for new transactions.

Or are you wanting to prune old addresses imported into a wallet.dat file that are now no longer in use? In this instance I would be more tempted to find the addresses with funds in the on the wallet and import these into a new wallet.dat file and use this new wallet going forward.

You can use Pywallet to prune old addresses out of the wallet but in the 14.0V of BTC i dont think there is a way.

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  • I have a business case where I generate many addresses - up to 1 per second in busy hours. They are not all used for receiving transactions, but could potentially be for up to a couple of weeks. I could write some elaborate address recycle system, but that would be complicated. The problem is my wallet.dat is at 700MB+ and growing.
    – Svante
    Mar 15, 2017 at 13:20
  • bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/23828/… pywallet does seem to be your only real solution for deleting old addresses. bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=561137.0 and bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=911735.0 suggest that pywallet is your only solution. Or you could start with a fresh wallet.dat by renaming the old wallet.dat file, but i dont think this would be suitable for your business case as you would loose the addresses from the original wallet.dat. time to make a feature request to the bitcoin devs i think :)
    – Fuzzybear
    Mar 15, 2017 at 14:26
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    @Svante: You'll find a number of other questions on this site from customers who accidentally sent more coins to a previous merchant address, and are angry because the merchant isn't giving them back. If you don't keep the old private keys somewhere, you'll be that merchant: customers, especially those who are new to Bitcoin, may not be able to comprehend that this is really their fault, nor to distinguish between "merchant can't" and "merchant won't".
    – Nate Eldredge
    Apr 8, 2017 at 16:30

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