Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: Avoiding Two Bitcoin Pitfalls
by
DannyHamilton
on 11/04/2013, 14:13:11 UTC
So how do I find out what my Bitcoins privkeys are?

That depends on how you got your bitcoin address.

Sorry, but that story is completely unreadable. Never heard of privkeys too. But I'm glad you do.

Unreadable?  It seemed to use well formed sentences with proper capitalization and punctuation.  I'd expect anyone who completed 9th grade to be able to read it.
privKeys is an abbriviation of "private keys".  Most wallets hide the private keys from you.  It isn't necessarily needed for you to "know your own privKeys", but it is important for you to understand the wallet you've chosen well enough to know what needs to be backed up in order to restore the wallet in case of disaster.  As an example, with the Bitcoin-Qt wallet, the private keys are stored in a file named wallet.dat.  As long as you have a recent undamaged copy of this file accessible, you can restore your wallet.  If this file isn't protected, and someone else gains access to it, then they can restore your wallet and spend your bitcoins without your authorization.

Is the wallet address considered the public key in this regard?

The bitcoin address is actually a hash of the public key.  There is no need to know the actual public key, the wallet software takes care of that for you.  Note that for most bitcoin wallets, there is no such thing as a "wallet address".  A wallet can have multiple addresses.  Each address is a "bitcoin address".