Quote from: siameze on January 03, 2016, 08:18:57 PM

This might be of help to you if you plan on using Electrum then: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transferring_coins_from_Bitcoin-Qt_to_Electrum

Thanks, I think I've seen that already and it left me with more questions than answers!
e.g. "Click Help -> Debug. Click the Console tab. Use the dumpprivkey command to get the private key. Repeat for as many bitcoin addresses as have money in them. "
That might make sense to a seasoned pro, but not me! My first question was where do I get this mythical list of addresses from (accounting for change etc?)
I tried using listaddressgroups but I was convinced BTC was missing, presumably that only produces reliable output after a full sync?
This is exactly why I kept going round in circles on the how-to's, as I was unsure of being able to do that stuff with only a 70% synced bitcoin core, so started playing with pywallet.

However now I understand the pywallet dump a bit more (see below) I think I'm close to that giving me the same info.

Quote from: saturn643 on January 03, 2016, 08:31:17 PM

The private keys you want to import cannot be the encrypted_privkey output. You must use dumpwallet with the passphrase to get the unencrypted private keys. Those keys should start with '5', 'K', or 'L'. If they don't, then something is wrong.

Wow, thank you for pointing that out! This is I think the EXACT void in my understanding, I didn't know it's content or format so I was hoping for a software solution that did, to make it real simple.
OK so if I compare pywallet dump with/without passphrase.

The wallet is encrypted but no passphrase is used
{
"bestblock":
"ckey": [],
"defaultkey":
"keys": [
{
"addr":
"compressed": true,
"encrypted_privkey":
"pubkey":
"reserve": 1
--

With passphrase applied there are extra fields:
The wallet is encrypted and the passphrase is correct
{
"bestblock":
"ckey": [],
"defaultkey":
"keys": [
{
"addr": ,
"compressed": true,
"encrypted_privkey": ,
"hexsec": ,
"pubkey": ",
"reserve": 1,
"sec": "K---something "
"secret":
---

Looking at the "sec" field of the various addresses, every single one starts with a K or an L. Are these my mysterious (to me) private keys!?
I would never have known without your tip Wink

Quote from: saturn643 on January 03, 2016, 08:31:17 PM

It is a very good wallet and you can import your private keys there, although I recommend that you actually create a wallet with Electrum and then sweep your exported private keys.

Ok groovy. Having done some manipulation on the pywallet dump (with password) to extract all references to the "sec": field I have what I think are 212 private keys.
Is there nothing else I need from the dump output?
So I install Electum, set a new wallet, tell it to Sweep those keys and I'm good to go?