How to get the private keys out of old wallet.dat without syncing blockchain

Question

I have old wallet.dat files of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Omnicore. My Bitcoin Cash wallet.dat has unbroadcasted transactions inside, so I am afraid that others might also have unbroadcasted transactions.

So, currently nodes are not running and I want to dump private keys of those wallets and import into new wallets in a way so that old unbroadcasted transactions are not sent.

What would be the best way to get private keys without loosing funds and without syncing blockchain (don't want to sync because of a risk that transactions will be broadcasted to the network)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

From bitcoin-qt, click Help->Debug and open the Console tab. Type in dumpwallet <outputFileName>, making sure that of course, the output filename isn't wallet.dat or it may overwrite your wallet.

This command creates a plain text version of your wallet with all private/public key pairs in WIF format.

You may need to configure your clients to point to the correct directory containing your wallet.dat with the -datadir command line option, or if you have a custom config file use -conf.

You can also use the dumpwallet command with bitcoin-cli if you have a bitcoind running.