Quote from: SgtSpike on July 11, 2011, 03:44:52 AM

Quote from: drrussellshane on July 11, 2011, 12:56:53 AM

Quote from: molecular on July 11, 2011, 12:40:41 AM

Quote from: Stardust on July 10, 2011, 09:29:17 AM

Quote from: molecular on July 08, 2011, 11:07:16 PM

Exporting of a key has a problem, doesn't it: the key is still in the source wallet. There's no way to remove it, is there? Even if there is, it's easy to screw up and people will wonder where their money went.

I do not seet it as a problem, so what if I have the same private key in many wallets? Actually for me that is the case, because I store my wallets in many places on the internet. Encrypted of course.

That's backup-copies. I have those, too.

But say I give a privkey to a friend as birthday present. He imports it at some point and I still have it in my wallet. Now there are two active bitcoin clients showing the balance of that key. If one of the two spends the money, it will disappear from the other client, also.

So my friend or I will wonder "where the hell my/his money went"

That's only if you gave your friend an address generated by the bitcoin client, or an imported address.

If you generated one for him with "vanitygen" or some other bitcoin address generator, and never imported it to your own wallet, you could freely give a private key to a friend and intentionally "lose" the key yourself so that you cannot access his funds.

So you're willing to make the assumption that I'll never want to give my friend an address generated by the bitcoin client, or imported by myself? I think that is a terrible assumption to make...

Give people the freedom to import/export as they want. Sheesh, this is getting as bad as government. "Well, I know what the people SHOULD have, and that's more important than what they want."

I was making no assumptions; I was under the impression that molecular was pondering a way to gift his friend a "pre-loaded" bitcoin address/privkey without being able to accidentally spend the coins himself. I was merely pointing out that there is a way to do this, albeit not with standard, unmodified client alone.

I'm all for freedom to import/export as people want.