So this is my situation:
Ive had BTC in my armory wallet for a couple of years.
I sold some BTC post fork but didnt even know about the fork until recently.
If I understand it correctly I have some BCH that I can claim (the same amount of BCH that I had BTC during the fork). Ive read the entire thread (keep in mind that Im a noob and probably only understood about 5% of what was written) and it looks like I can install Armory on an external HDD (dont have enough space on my laptop to have another approx 150 GB for the blockchain) and delete some blocks (until about the date at the fork?) and somehow I will see the amount of BTC i had during that time? (which is exactly the same amount of BCH I had at that time). I can then send those BCH to another wallet by checking the box BCH signer?
If I do something wrong (like forgetting to check the BCH signer) I might lose my regular BTC? Do you recommend me making another wallet and send all my BTC to that wallet first? Can I somehow make a mistake and leak my private keys and therefore basically lose my BTC? (someone commented Do not expose your private keys. and I have no idea what I can or cant do to expose them)
All I want to do is to move some of my BCH to a safe place and some of my BCH to an exchange and trade in for BTC and some altcoins.
Is there any possibility at all that if I wait to much, I might lose my BCH (If BCH converts to other addresses or something like that). Keep in mind that Im a complete noob 😊
I guess I first also have to update my Armory version since I right now have 0.95.1? Where can I update armory? Do I need to uninstall the version I have now before updating?
Hello ConnyH,
from what I understand it's like this: Consider the blockchain as a path you walk down. At the moment of the fork the path splits in two paths and you can walk down BOTH paths and have the history of the original path on each path up to the moment of the fork. So deleting the blockchain part after the fork for synchronizing the BCH blockchain is one necessary measure.
The second measure you need to take is use a client, that can follow the chain down the new path. That is either Bitcoin Unlimited or Bitcoin ABC (for simplicity, take that one). You need to install one of those instead of Bitcoin Core and make Armory use that as the backend. Then the client will synchronize with the BCH chain and you will see your wallet from before the fork with your BCH coins in it.
You can't do anything wrong. BCH has a replay protection, so with the wrong signer in the transaction the transaction will not be accepted by the BCH network and vice versa. What you could do wrong: Send BCH coins to someone's BTC address or vice versa. Usually people create separate wallets for both coins in order not to confuse the addresses and the reason I will describe next. So take care, which coins the recipient expects on which address.
Possibility of losing your BCH if you wait for too long? Yes, there is a faint possibility: If the public key cryptography linking the private to the public key turns out to have a weakness or progress in quantum computing is made in the near future (likely within the next decade), so someone is able to derive your private key for an address from your public key of that address. Since you already spent coins post fork the public key for that address can be found with the spending transaction on the bitcoin blockchain. If someone were able to derive the private key from that at reasonable cost, you run the chance of losing the BCH coins in that address.