Wallet

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Revision as of 20:28, 6 April 2016 by JonathanCross (talk | contribs) (Improving the intro to indicate more common use of the term "wallet" as software for managing keys instead of a file. This matches https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet)
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A Bitcoin wallet is a piece of software used to manage private keys and to make transactions on the Bitcoin network. Wallets may offer additional features such as address labels, contacts, signing messages, etc.

Bitcoin Qt

The original Bitcoin client stores private key information in a file named wallet.dat acording to the so called [1]:

  • 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"[2].

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

Armory

The Armory client uses a custom binary wallet format and runs on top of Bitcoin-Core[3].

Blockchain.info

Blockchain.info use a plain text JSON wallet format documented here. Private keys Keys are stored in base58.


Cubits

Cubits.com has both cold and hot wallet, with all user's funds stored securely in the cold wallet.

Multibit

Multibit uses the bitcoinj protobuf wallet file.


See Also

References