17
votes
Accepted
Filesystem is corrupt. How to find wallet.dat?
It has magic bytes plus a version number at byte 12 in the file:
00000000 [00 00 00 00 01 00 00 00] [00 00 00 00] [62 31 05 00]
^ lsn ^ page num ^ magic
00000010 ...
- 28.6k
15
votes
opening an old wallet.dat
I recently recovered an old wallet.dat file using pywalley.py and Electrum, which allowed me to read the wallet and sweep the coins to a new Electrum wallet.
Steps:
Get the jackjack pywallet https://...
- 291
14
votes
Accepted
How can I create a new wallet on Bitcoin Core?
Bitcoin Core will create a new wallet if it cannot find the wallet.dat in the Bitcoin Core folder.
Close Bitcoin Core.
If the wallet still has a balance, or addresses from the wallet were given out, ...
- 62.3k
11
votes
How can I get the private key from wallet.dat from 2011 Bitcoin software on WinXP?
The wallet.dat was created with Bitcoin Core (in 2011 it was called "Bitcoin").
You should install the newest version of Bitcoin-Core (0.14.2 by the time of writing). The wallet.dat from 2011 should ...
- 5,896
9
votes
Accepted
Why is the Bitcoin Core wallet database moving from Berkeley DB to SQLite?
The introduction of descriptor wallets presents an opportunity to introduce a new database backend as descriptor wallets are backwards incompatible. The following is taken from Andrew Chow's blog post ...
- 9,312
8
votes
Is it possible to send coins WITHOUT importing private key?
Basically what Murch said. You have to use the private key to sign the transaction.
There is a point I want to add, however. It is possible to send coins without importing the private key into a ...
- 1,104
8
votes
Can I retrieve my bitcoins from years ago that I never received?
If you still have the wallet.dat file and your password you can access your bitcoins. You do not have to use Bitcoin-Qt 7 and it does not matter if your wallet ever synced before. If the sender sent ...
- 233
5
votes
How to merge two wallet.dat files
Latest versions of the reference Bitcoin implementation have the 'dumpwallet' RPC command, which dumps a human-readable list of all of your private keys.
The format is simple: just comment-lines (...
- 3,352
5
votes
Accepted
What happens if I delete wallet.dat?
Since wallet.dat is mostly a collection of private keys, you will simply lose all private keys that you have not duplicated or copied. It also by default stores the next 100 Bitcoin addresses it will ...
- 2,863
5
votes
Accepted
Dumping private keys from wallet.dat from command line (pywallet.py alternatives)
This is an old question but just to say that the dumpwallet command has been added to bitcoin core. This will give you all the private keys in a text format.
- 66
5
votes
Accepted
Bitcoin core: why does the wallet file contain transactions?
You can't spend bitcoins without having the transactions in which you received the bitcoins. Bitcoin Core also needs to actually know about your transactions to display them with RPC commands like ...
- 8,674
5
votes
Accepted
Wallet.dat (<0.4.0) format: retrieving Bitcoin, possible security concerns
Using wallet /import
If you load the wallet file in a modern Bitcoin Core version, you can use the dumpwallet command (to create an unencrypted dump of the keys), and the importwallet command in a ...
- 82.3k
5
votes
Accepted
Why are there ETH addresses in bitcoin wallet.dat?
Ethereum addresses are the trailing 20 bytes of keccak256(public_key). In other words, ethereum addresses are any collection of 20 bytes.
0014{20 byte payload} in Bitcoin is the redeem script for a ...
- 16.4k
4
votes
How to determine what type of coins a wallet.dat 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. ...
- 22.7k
4
votes
How can I delete an address (private key) in the list of received Bitcoins?
Archive all the priv keys that you want to save. Close bitcoin-qt.
Delete wallet.dat.
Open bitcoin-qt.exe again.
Import keys that you have dumped before.
4
votes
How to dump all of addresses from wallet.dat for other alt-coins?
now you can use bitcoin-cli dumpwallet command to export all your privkeys
- 141
4
votes
How can I create a new wallet on Bitcoin Core?
With bitcoin-core version 0.21, A default wallet is no longer automatically created
Here is the command to create a new wallet.
$ bitcoin-wallet -wallet=wallet.dat create
Topping up keypool...
Wallet ...
- 161
4
votes
How can I fix corrupted encrypted wallet.dat?
Found out that pywallet has recovery feature, and it worked:
Created 1GB FAT32 partition on flash drive(/dev/sdb1 in my case), copied corrupted wallet.dat on it and run:
nyaa@ubuntu:~/github/...
- 171
4
votes
How do I retrieve my backed up wallet to Bitcoin Core?
Restoring a wallet on a fresh machine:
Start Bitcoin-Core (daemon or Qt), shut it down after it has started up (you only do that to create the necessary data directory)
Replace wallet.dat with your ...
- 5,896
4
votes
Accepted
How to migrate bitcoin node from one computer to another
This method is used by Bitcoin Core (and few others) and comprises of backing up a wallet.dat file. It's a file that holds keys to spend outputs, addresses, transaction information, and other metadata ...
- 548
4
votes
How do wallets work?
Does it create a public key based of private?
Yes, a cryptographic routine exists that computes the public key from the private key.
maybe on the wallet.dat file?
All modern wallet software ...
- 82.3k
4
votes
What do they mean by "12/24 words" or "seed words"?
Bitcoin Core does not support BIP39, or any other seed word standard. You are correct that this implies backing up wallet.dat and keeping it safe directly. This is a good idea in any case, even if ...
- 82.3k
4
votes
Accepted
How to get rid of 'ghost' wallets in Bitcoin Core?
In the data directory, there should be a file named settings.json. Just delete the lines with the names of the wallets that you have removed.
The file needs to contain valid json, so you also need to ...
- 60.4k
4
votes
Accepted
explore sqlite wallet
The data stored is binary data, which is why it comes out garbled. It is not text. So you will have to convert the data to something human readable. One such method is to convert it to hex. One such ...
- 60.4k
3
votes
How to move an address to a new wallet?
Open Bitcoin-Qt with old wallet (Menu: Help / Debug window / Console):
walletpassphrase "OLDWALLETPASSPHRASE" 600
dumpprivkey "BITCOINADDRESS"
walletlock
...write down private key and close program. ...
3
votes
Why does wallet.dat differ after running?
The wallet contains a lot of metadata, and is actually a database rather than a flat file. At a minimum it contains a record of where you were last synced to in the chain, allowing any node that loads ...
- 15k
3
votes
How does salvagewallet work?
zcoin seems to be a fork of Bitcoin Core.
Bitcoin Core's -salvagewallet does carefully try to recover a broken wallet database (wallet.dat file).
What it does is:
Copy the wallet.dat file (wallet.&...
- 5,896
3
votes
how to recover a wallet from crashed bitcoin core
If you still have the wallet.dat file in the backup from your old bitcoin core, you can still access your funds. Let the new installation finish syncing, then import the wallet.dat using the "...
- 131
3
votes
How can I import an address or public key into my wallet.dat file?
A wallet.dat file will contain many, many bitcoin keypairs/addresses. So there is no reason to delete an older address, and in fact this is probably a bad idea. If you or anyone else ever mistakenly ...
- 17.2k
3
votes
Accepted
What does best block time mean in wallet.dat
Its the time the wallet was last synchronized to, it won't know about any transaction changes in or out past this time until it has been loaded again by a synchronized node. It has nothing to do with ...
- 15k
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