What does the bitcoin client mean when it says it’s going to stop supporting old wallets?
Old wallet issues with bitcoin client support
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What wallet are you talking about? Are you talking about a bitcoin core wallet file? In other words, do you have a wallet.dat file?
Are you talking about any other wallet? Have you received any message or have you read something somewhere? If so, can you please share the message?
coin_sigmaLegendary
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#3Jan 23, 2021, 02:03 PM
It seems he is talking about any Bitcoin client, not only Bitcoin Core, since Electrum also has a backup file (defaultwallet).
That's why having a backup of this on a cold storage device is way better because you can use it offline to sign a transaction without upgrading it to the latest version.
So if any of these Bitcoin clients you're talking about ends support of the old wallet, then having an extra backup of these wallet files can still be recoverable, or dumping it's private on a cold storage device is a great idea and save them somewhere safe.
In the upcoming bitcoin core you just need to use a conversion utility that is included with bitcoin core if you want to use keys from an old wallet. It's just an extra step when upgrading or pulling a wallet out of cold storage.
gr3g.0rbitHero Member
Posts: 1025 · Reputation: 2646
#5Jan 24, 2021, 06:53 AM
He must be referring to this message when loading a legacy wallet.dat:
If it's that message, it's talking about this update to move from Legacy to Descriptor wallets: Proposed Timeline for Legacy Wallet and BDB removal (#20160)
It's a detailed list that shows what happened in the previous versions and the what will happen in the next (v30.0).
which version?
core 27.1 here no such message
That is it bud. So old wallets cannot be used? It costs to transfer funds to a new wallet. Transfer fees.
As the warning says, old wallets can be migrated (i.e. upgraded) to the descriptor wallet format using the utility built into Bitcoin Core. This process only modifies the wallet file on disk and does not cause any transactions. There are no fees in order to migrate. The migration tool will exist in Bitcoin Core for a very long time, if not forever.