Wallet

A Bitcoin wallet is a file named wallet.dat and contains:

• keypairs for each of your addresses
• transactions done from/to your addresses
• user preferences
• default key
• reserve keys
• accounts
• a version number
• Key pool
• Since 0.3.21: information about the current best chain, to be able to rescan automatically when restoring from a backup.

The data file for the wallet is wallet.dat and is located in the Bitcoin data directory.

It is intended that a wallet be used on only one installation of Bitcoin at a time. Attempting to clone a wallet for use on multiple computers will result in "weird behavior".

The format of this file is Berkeley DB. Tools that can manipulate wallet files include pywallet.

See Also

• Securing your wallet
• EWallet
• Deterministic Wallet