Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Re: [Bitcoin Knots] porting an old wallet and 2 laptop airgap setup
by
takuma sato
on 31/08/2025, 03:54:27 UTC
-snip-
What would happen if I used Bitcoin Knots to run the online node but use Sparrow wallet to manage private keys and craft the transactions (to be broadcasted on the Bitcoin Knots node)?
Do you mean use Bitcoin Knots as server?
If so, there shouldn't be any issue for using Knots in place of Core as "Bitcoin Core" server option.

Just enable "Bitcoin RPC server" option in the settings or add "server=1" to your bitcoin.conf file so it will create a '.cookie' file that Sparrow requires.

Quote from: takuma sato
I mean, since it's an old wallet.dat, will Sparrow wallet software have any problems?
This is where the question became confusing, do you mean loading the old wallet.dat to Sparrow?
Because you mentioned a wallet.dat file, yet, you intended to use Sparrow as the wallet and Knots as server.

The actual auto-setup that will happen is, Sparrow will create a descriptor wallet named "cormorant" in Knots for you that will contain your Sparrow wallet's watch-only descriptors (containing xpubs).
Any other old/new wallets it already has will not be affected nor required by using it as server for Sparrow.

No, let's forget about Sparrow and keeps thing as basic as possible without adding aditional layers of complexity (and for me having to trust another software is just that). Let's recap, this is what I want:

1) Laptop 1: Bitcoin Knots, fully synced. I need a watch-only wallet to broadcast transactions
2) Laptop 2: Bitcoin Knots, no blockchain, airgap. wallet with keys sits there. I need to make the old 2013 wallet work there. Then create the watch-only wallet for the Laptop 1.

I need to learn how to use PSBT, so I can send a transaction from Laptop 2 to 1, using the GUI with Coin Control to select utxos. For this, I want to use testnet coins first. I will need to see how testnet works, I think I used it ages ago but don't remember.

Anyway, so how do I do this? In this thread there is some convoluted way where im going to need to go key by key? wtf. There is no other way? It's a 2013 wallet, but was used until 2015, so im not sure if it was converted to HD by the 2015 Core version which I think it was around when HD was introduced, or its just the same wallet.

I need to know what im doing here and I don't have a clear gameplan yet of how to proceed.