Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: How long does it take for a bitcoin address to become inactive?
by
ucwise
on 11/12/2017, 13:33:35 UTC
Could you explain why you're asking this? I'm not sure if I understand this question, but I can explain some concepts.

There are no accounts in the Bitcoin protocol. The Ethereum protocol does use accounts, but those are not like bank accounts either. For most purposes, you can act like your bitcoins exist on your computer like cash in a physical wallet, but that's not strictly true. The wallet.dat file on your computer contains the private keys to your addresses. With these private keys you can spend amounts of bitcoin that are recorded publicly on the blockchain as unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs).

This means that nothing will happen to an inactive wallet as long as you, and only you, can access your private keys. In fact, it's recommended to store them offline, either as a backup or as savings. Offline wallets can be paper wallets or devices like the Trezor, called hardware wallets.

You could have an account with an exchange website or a web wallet service. In that case, everything depends on their rules. It's like giving a valet the keys to your car. Not recommended.

Another meaning of the word ‘wallet’ is the software you use to spend and receive bitcoin, e.g. Multibit or Bitcoin Core. This needs to be updated from time to time in order to apply improvements in safety and features.

In the future, a second version of the blockchain might be split off, creating a new currency. At first, bitcoin owners will have the same amount of coins on both chains. This has never happened with Bitcoin, but some people are planning a fork, as it's called, in order to process more transactions per second.

I read this over and over again and I've been able to capture something. The wallet address is entirely different from the private key I guess? How do I locate the private key of my blockchain wallet? I don't think I ever received that when I created a blockchain wallet but I could remember I got a private key from myetherwallet.