Thank you!

So does this public key apply to all the private addresses? I seem to have 26 and a bunch that begin with p2wpkh:

Thank you for your replies.

I've forgotten everything I knew about blockchain, coins and wallets! My head is spinning now!

After going through all the bumph in my password manager it turns out I've exchanged everything into BTC, except 649 MUSIC.

I'm not going to use bitaddress.org and go for the suggested Electrum. The BAT can carry on dropping into the Uphold wallet that the Brave Browser setup until something exciting happens.

Setting up a paper wallet with Electrum...
I use Linux so I've downloaded the Python sources, transferred the package to an offline computer and run it without installing.
Then, created a standard wallet, created a new seed (segwit), written the seed down and I didn't encrypt my wallet keys with a password.

I am assuming that for as long as Electrum is around then the seed is all I need. Id' like to jot down the other keys too.

This is where I get confused! I thought you have a private key, a public key and a hash of the public that creates the bitcoin address and that it's the bitcoin address you give out if you want someone to send you BTC.

I have found the "Master Public Key" but don't see a private key or bitcoin address. I've clicked on View-Addresses and I get a list of "receiving" and "change" addresses. I guess you get a bunch of private keys in a wallet and I am now looking at them.

I just want one private key along with the related public key and Bitcoin address.

How can I get these keys/addresses from Electrum?

Thanks for the help guys! I can't believe how much I've forgotten! Like, for instance, the fact that I exchanged all my coins!!

I've got a bunch of coins kept in wallets at an exchange and I want to move them all to offline paper wallets.

Looking at my records I seem to have BTC, BAT, BTG, PASC, MUSIC, ELLA and XMR.

I've been to bitaddress.org, created a wallet and printed it. Before I transfer my BTC I wanted to double check that this is a legit wallet generator... most of my $$$$ is BTC.

How about the other coins? Most are low balances. I think MUSIC is now worthless, but nonetheless, I might ask well keep them!

Thanks

I've had endless problems too. I found running Geth from the command prompt (don't worry about the --fast command if you already have stuff in your chaindata folder) got it to sync without crashing or stalling. It was painfully slow though and I had to leave it on permanently if I wanted quick access to my balance.

I gave up in the end and shifted it all somewhere else; less secure :-(

I have been mining MUSIC for the last few weeks at 60MH/s. This should give a return of 200 coins a day. But this morning I added up how many coins I got yesterday, then the day before, and a few more random days from the past. Turns out I'm being rewarded only 130-150. Substantially less!

I was using Genoil's ethminer. So I switched to Claymore's and it is telling me that almost every other share is being rejected.

Are there any steps I can take to reduce the number of rejected shares?

Thank you

I had something similar happen (only 1 temp was showing for three cards) and it turned out that Windows updated the recommended driver the latest. I think its Crimson 15.12 that is recommended.

:-) Its been a few days since I logged and since I last read this thread I have started to use Teamviewer.

My ISP updated the firmware of my router which disabled/removed DDNS. So I gave Teamviewer a try. Its great! It just works, no account required and its free! I have even started to use it using my Android phone. It's often said if things sound too good to be true then they usually are. Teamviewer is an exception, as I was told many times.

I didn't know this. It now means I can play eXtreme gammon for free on the PC :-)

Thanks for the help guys, and for anyone reading this post because they are wriggling around with IP addresses, DDNS and Windows Remote Desktop just save yourself a few hours and install Teamviewer!

Thank you for all the replies. Teamviewer certainly gets a lot of mentions!

I'm not discounting using Teamviewer or any other piece of third-party software but given Remote Desktop and the RDP is built into Windows I thought I'd give it a go. I don't know what happened the first time I lost connection because after a restart it worked again but after the second occasion I realised that my public IP was changing so I didn't have the correct address to login with. If I stop that from happening then RDP will be all I need. I have a few questions about accessing RDP through a VPN but i'll start a new topic for that.

I'm staying away from home for a month or so and have left the mining rig at home. No more noise!

I have setup remote desktop so that I can manage the computer but on both occasions I have started either Geth or Mist I lose connection with the remote computer, never to regain. I have given it enough time to resynchronise but I still cannot connect to it.

After I jump in the car and go to see whats going on I find the computer doing its thing, as expected. I have to close Geth/Mist (restart computer for good measure, I don't wanted a repeated trip) before I can connect again.

Has anybody else experienced this? Is there a cause and workaround for this problem? Is it Geth/Mist or just a coincidence?

Thanks for any help.

I've just bought a second computer and don't really want to buy another copy of Windows. So the obvious thing to do is use a Linux distro.

Will I have to download the Ethereum blockchain again or can I somehow copy the blockchain from my Windows computer?

Thank you!

Thank you for responding so quickly!

I have run --fast and have something like 22.3GB. I'm wondering if it is OK to close geth and open Mist?

OMG, I tried Minergate and haven't been impressed so I have decided to download the blockchain and mine to a more convincing pool.

Last time I tried this I downloaded Mist and it started to download the blockchain but it was taking an age and I read that you can use the --fast command on the command prompt to speed things up. At this point I went to Minergate.

Now I have downloaded geth, run it with the --fast command and it has downloaded all of the blockchain. Its still running and continuously downloading new data.

I'm wondering what to do next.
Geth
If I close geth and re-open it tomorrow will it just catch up?
Does geth always need to be running and synchronised before a miner is started?
Do I have to use the --fast command again or can I just open geth.

Mist
Also, if I download Mist can I just open that instead?
Does it matter that I used the --fast command when, I suspect, Mist downloads everything?

Thank you for any help!

I've started to mine using my desktop and have bought a couple of additional graphics cards but the noise and heat is beginning to get to me. So, I think its time to buy a second motherboard/cpu/ram.

Is it worth buying a half decent motherboard and CPU for GPU mining or will any old second-hand combo from ebay do? I currently have an MSI z170A Pro, 8GB DDR4 3000 and an i3-6100. Do I need something similar?
I guess it will be worth buying a motherboard with 5-6 PCIe slots... any suggestions for 'not new' hardware?

Thank you

EDIT: I've just realised this is the Bitcoin mining forum. I'd look into altcoins with your setup.

I have always found myself using this website instead...
https://whattomine.com/coins

Just double check the power consumption. Whattomine says each of my R9 380s uses 130w for Equihash but my whole system (i3-6100, 2 x R9 380, 2 sticks RAM, 650w PSU, M.2 SSD and no fans!) uses 380w. Thats just using the GPUs.
Incidently, when mining XMR using 2 R9 380s and my i3-6100 I only use 360w.

I bought a £10 monitor.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/13a-plug-in-energy-saving-monitor-n67fu?cmpid=ppc%3Abatteries___power%3Apla%3Agoogle&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9s-wrp3H1AIVab7tCh1DaQCeEAQYASABEgKs0fD_BwE

I'm not too clued up on the different GPUs but I think the 7750 is quite efficient on power, but it probably wont hash very quickly.

Thank you for spending the time to reply to my ranty OP!

I think from what I have read here, and elsewhere, I need to ditch Jaxx. I like the interface and features but it has gotten even buggier for me (It wont even show the exchange rates for ShapeShift now). Now I understand how a 'seed' works it begs belief you can't password protect it. I guess I was wooed by being able to have ETH, BTC and ZEC in one place that could synch between my phone and desktop and enable quick and easy use of ShapeShift. I'm going to have to buy some drives and download the blockchains, at least until its worth me transferring to a paper wallet and hiding it under the bed!


Thank you, these few sentences have made things so much clearer!


I didn't consider the re-use of words. 1x10⁵⁴ is big.... astronomical you could say, but so is 10³⁹!

There's some great info here that has helped me a lot. I hope it can help others too.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for all the information in your responses. Nobody here has to spend the time reading and replying to my (long) OP so thank you for time. There's so much info it's difficult for me to respond to each point but I have certainly learned a lot from reading through. I will continue to try to understand how the blockchains work and how transactions are made but I feel its going to take some time before it all sinks in! I'll keep re-reading achow101's part about scripts and look into this further.

As a newbie to it all, I feel its important to properly understand how wallets work and the responses to my OP really have helped. In doing this a lot of other questions can be answered. I did try Jaxx and have accrued a small balance but the security issue that popped up in the news (and, for me, its quite buggy) reduced my confidence in that type of wallet. I don't want to use online wallets so I will just have to 'bite the bullet' and buy a couple of big drives for a RAID 1 array and download the blockchains. I don't really plan on spending my balances, just exchanging until I have enough to let (hopefully) appreciate so eventually I'll probably use paper wallets.   

There's a lot of good info here so I hope others will find these messages and learn from them.

Thank you!

I think I have questions about Jaxx because its buggy but before I migrate I thought i'd make sure it isn't me being dumb! I only started out with cryptocurrencys 5-6 days ago and have only amounted £20 so if my inexperience is going to lose me money it's best done now!

When searching for a wallet/s I quickly learned that downloading the full node for each respective currency is a sure way to fill up my 128gb harddrive. After lots and lots of googling I settled with Jaxx. I understand it as a wallet that doesn't require you to download the full node, the private keys are stored locally and that it supports multi-currencys. I am interested in BTC, ETH and ZEC.

First quick question... If the private keys are stored locally how come when I installed Jaxx on my android phone did I just have to enter the 12 word pass phrase to get access to my private keys? They must have been downloaded from somewhere which means they are stored at a location other than 'local'. Is this a vulnerability (surely, 'Yes' ?). Jaxx was reported to have been insecure earlier this week but I dont know exactly how. Some of what I have read seems to suggest the security issue comes from thieves accessing your harddrive for the 12 word pass phrase. Most of my reading was on forums, and news websites I have never heard of so I concluded I might be contaminating my mind with potentially misinformation and just swallowed that Jaxx could be insecure. I'm assuming the locally stored private keys are kept in C:\Users\%User%\AppData\Roaming\Jaxx. Does my encrypted C: help my security? Couldn't the developers just code Jaxx so that this folder can be kept on a USB stick so that the private keys are offline until you need to use them?

My frustration with Jaxx started yesterday when I tried to use Shapeshift to exchange some ZEC for ETH. The transaction debited my ZEC wallet and I knew I would have to wait a little while for it to appear in my ETH wallet. So I went to bed only to find this morning that the ZEC had been returned to my ZEC wallet and nothing credited to my ETH wallet. The transaction failed. No real loss to me other than ETH was a relatively good price given my point of entry to the cryptocurrency game. But I cant find any record of the attempted exchange or the return of the ZEC. The transaction history in Jaxx only shows the very first payment from the pool. So I reset the Jaxx cache. Still only one entry in the transaction history only now its the most recent payment from the pool, oh and the value of my ZEC coins now says £0.00. The ZEC balance is there (all of what I have mined) but no figure for £ or $. Long story short... bar a few minor differences, the same happened with the Jaxx android app too. I have typed my public address into the ZCash block explorer and it reports 6 transactions received but nothing sent. I kind of expected to 1 sent (my exchange) and 7 received (my 6 pool payments and the returned exchange).

Another thing that has me scratching my head is when I view my private keys. When I first tried mining to my wallet address. It failed, it wouldn't mine. So I clicked on 'view private keys' and there were two private keys, each with a different public key. I just selected one the of the public keys and mined to that. Its been working fine. I have read that its a good idea to change the wallet address for each transaction so expected this to change after each transaction. Sure enough this has changed but its changed to the other public key (the one I didn't use to mine to). I'm confused by this because that new wallet address is an existing public key that is derived from a different private key. I thought that your wallet has/is a private key. From this, you get a public key and from that you get a wallet address. Even if the public key changes too I expected the private key to always be the same. Is this normal?

Is Jaxx just buggy and worth steering clear of? Am I just not well enough read. Or both!? I suspect both but Jaxx really isnt helping my understanding.

Am I right to expect just one private key with a public that may, or may not, change and a wallet address that does change after each transaction.
Should I expect to see a complete list of all transactions made to and from my wallet or just the most recent since a cache reset?
Does a failed/returned transaction get logged as a transaction so that the attempt can be traced?
Where are the public and private keys actually stored? I thought on my C: so how are they now viewable on my phone after only entering the 12 word passphrase.

(The convenience of only having to remember the passphrase is great (no backing up of files, and backing up the backup etc!) but it seems to me that you can access all my crypto-wealth by forcing the discovery of the 12 word passphrase. Couldn't you just write some code to punch in 12 word combos repeatedly until you hit gold? There are only so many words in English dictionary. EDIT, well 171,476, but as time goes on there will be a lot of wallets created and thus increasing the chances of finding an active combination. EDIT again, actually, there are about 1.348x10^54 combinations! Quite a few!)



 

 
 

When I bought my first R9 380 I tried the 15.12 driver and it yielded the same as the most recent driver. I'll try it again and report back.

EDIT: Yup, for one card the driver version made no difference... for two, the 15.12 driver now gives 210sol/s on each card and reports temps and fan utilisation for both cards (it only did it for GPU 0 last time). I should have re-read the instructions!

Thank you!

Please could somebody help me work out how to get the most out of my R9 380s.

I used to mine ZEC using a GTX950 and got 165 sol/s. I then bought an R9 380 and with using the Claymore Zcash AMD GPU miner I got an extra 210 sol/s. I then bought a second R9 380 and swapped out the GTX950.
Initially I was getting 210 sol/s on each card but my mining pool report said I was hashing at 0 sol/s. I left it for a few hours and still nothing, despite the miner seeming to be working OK.

I restarted the miner and now I get 175 sol/s from one card and 20 sol/s from the other. I dont understand whats happening. Do I need to run two instances of the miner or change some settings? I have played with the intensity. I havent put it above 6 yet but if I lower the intensity the hash rate goes down.

Please help! I was hoping to mine at over 400 sol/s but at the moment i'm getting 200 sol/s from two R9 380s!

For the past day or so I have been trying to get my head around Bitcoins; where they come from and how they are managed. This is my understanding so far. Please could somebody tell me if I understand correctly? The info returned from google is a bit of a minefield and I don't really know what to take on board or ignore. I'm even having trouble working out what type of wallet some providers offer! A lot of websites just churn out sales patter about how secure and safe everything is... blah blah blah, but with minimal info about how they look after your keys.

My understanding so far,
Private/public keys
All Bitcoins are essentially held within the blockchain. The Bitcoins you own are protected by your private key. You need to know the private key to send/exchange Bitcoins.
This key is obviously something you don't want the world to know so a public key is derived from the private key. The private key cannot be found using the public key. Bitcoins cannot be sent using the public key but it can be made public so that you can receive Bitcoins.

When a Bitcoin is sent to your public key the message is sent encrypted. Your private key is able to decrypt this info so that the transaction completes. In the unlikely event that somebody is able to create your public key from thier private key, your private key adds a signature to the public key to verify it was derived from your private key. This ensures that the private key that made the public key is the only key that can decrypt messages sent to the public key. This signature check is only made when the received Bitcoins are attempted to be spent/exchanged. It is only at this point it will be known if a 'hacker' private key received the transaction.

Wallet, spends/exchanges
A wallet is a collection of keys (private, public, wallet address) used to access/view relevant parts of the blockchain (the information, not the actual data). This is almost always some software to put these keys to use. Using your private key you can view the amount of Bitcoins you own, send payments and make a public key so that you can receive payments. The wallet is given an address that is a hash derived from the public key. Payments can be made to this wallet address. All I know is that the wallet address is used as an extra level of protection from private keys being reverse engineered from a public key. This is because the signiture check is only made when the received funds are attempted to be used. The wallet address hash adds protection through extra security and discouragement associated to the time element.

Types of wallet
Online
The provider downloads the bloackchain for you, keeps hold of your private key (and associated public and wallet address) and you access it all using a username and password.
Desktop
You download the blockchain and have a copy of the keys and wallet address. These keys are stored in wallet.dat (or similar). You absolutely must make backups of this file.
Hardware
The keys are stored on a hardware device.
Paper
The keys are printed onto paper.

Hot store are keys that are produced/stored on a computer connected to the internet.
Cold store are keys produced/stored on a computer not connected to the internet.

I much prefer the idea of having a program (wallet) installed on my computer that gives me a file that is my private key so I can keep this key on a SD card (or three). I do this with pretty well everything... an sd card to decrypt my boot drive, an sd card with my password manager file (and another for the key to open the file) etc etc. I keep anything that can give access to something on its own sd card, along with a backup card.

If you take the desktop wallet route, do you need to download the blockchain for all the currencies you use? I ask because at first I wanted to mine Ethereum. It took 10hrs to download the blockchain and takes up 20gb of my 128gb bootdrive. Space is one thing but the time it all takes is something akin to late 90's downloading. I should have done more reading because the dag is bigger than my vram. So I tried Monero. This didn't download any blockchain and just works by typing in a single line command into the miner and its off. Can desktop wallets work without downloading the blockchain?

My next task is to decide on a wallet... I thought about using the official desktop wallet for each currency I use but the blockchain download is putting me off. Any suggestions?

If you're reading this you got to the end of my looong message!
Thank you for reading and any help