Importing/exporting privatekeys and POS minting

If I export the privatekey of an address in my wallet, will the coinage accumulated in the address be destroyed?

If I export the privatekeys of some coins in a wallet, and let these coins accumulate coinage. What happens if I later import the privatekeys of these coins to another wallet? Will the coinage in the original wallet be affected?

If the coinage is not destroyed during importing, what happens if I export the private key of some coins then import it to 10 wallets ? Will the coins in in all wallets accumulate coinage? After 30 days, will all wallets start POS minting? I assume once one of the wallet finds POS, other wallet won’t find valid POS blocks for the same coinage. Can someone confirm this assumption? I would still gain advantage in shortening the time to find POS block by 10 times, right?

If I cold-store coins, will the time the coins spent in cold-storage generate POS after the coins are re-activated (by importing privatekey) in a wallet?

Hey mhps,

I’m having a hard time understanding your question, mostly because I’m unsure of what importing/exporting private keys will actually do.

However, what I can tell you is that the coinage of your coins can only be destroyed in two ways, 1)making a transaction will consume the coinage of the coins transacted, and 2) using your coinage to mint new coins for yourself (here the coinage is consumed in solving PoS blocks).

Note: I’d hold off minting right now simple because it’s not that user friendly and quite confusing, and just wait for v0.4 of Peercoin which is due out soon, (like 2-7weeks, or sooner, no one really knows :wink: ) It will make things clear for everyone.

Cheers.

Hi are you saying this because you have read them from the source code or because others have said so?

By exporting the privatekey of an address and importing it to another wallet, both wallets own the same address (and coins therein).

JetJet13 is right, there only those two ways to destroy coinage as far as is known.
Coinage will accumulate whether you computer is off-line or your wallet.dat resides on a USB stick somewhere.
Below my response on your questions:

If I export the privatekey of an address in my wallet, will the coinage accumulated in the address be destroyed?

No, as above

If I export the privatekeys of some coins in a wallet, and let these coins accumulate coinage. What happens if I later import the privatekeys of these coins to another wallet? Will the coinage in the original wallet be affected?

The privatekey or the wallet doesn’t hold your coinage or coins. The privatekey should be seen as the way to access your coins which actually live in the blockchain, which is basically in the the peer-to-peer cloud with copies on all clients.
So you can create multiple wallets on multiple computers, but you still have access to one single wallet with your coins.
If you have multiple wallets/accounts e.g. 10 coins in one and 15 coins in another, you need to backup them both (either the private key or the whole wallet.dat which holds the encrypted private key)

If the coinage is not destroyed during importing, what happens if I export the private key of some coins then import it to 10 wallets ? Will the coins in in all wallets accumulate coinage? After 30 days, will all wallets start POS minting? I assume once one of the wallet finds POS, other wallet won’t find valid POS blocks for the same coinage. Can someone confirm this assumption? I would still gain advantage in shortening the time to find POS block by 10 times, right?

No matter how many wallets you export to, you only own one account in the blockchain which they would all point to. Coinage is just a calculation by the wallet based on when you started to own your coins and kept them in your wallet and didn’t mint coins. The information for this is all being held in the blockchain and your wallet (private key) gives access and the client makes the calculations for you and displays the transactions, balance etc.

If I cold-store coins, will the time the coins spent in cold-storage generate POS after the coins are re-activated (by importing privatekey) in a wallet?
When you take you coins out of cold-storage and import the private key into a wallet then they are ready to mint based on your coinage in the blockchain

If you compare it with a normal bank account, the private key, would be your username/password, the wallet is the browser and internet page of your bank displaying your balance. The blockchain is the bank’s ledger.
When you make payments you need to provide your public key, which can be compared with the bank asking for a pin, a code from an authenticator or something similar when transferring money.
Minting can be compared with gaining interest. You only gain interest if you don’t touch your money for a certain amount of time (minimum 30 days for Peercoin). Coinage is basically the calculation of the time you don’t touch the coins. After 30 days you can ask the bank to pay out by putting the coins up for stake.
The more coinage you have the better the chance you have to get a payout (minting new coins). Even if you don’t get a payout after 90 days your coinage is still accumulating (as far as I understand). Only the chance that you can actually mint coins doesn’t increase any further after 90 days.

Hope it makes sense.

Edit: formatting it nicely ::slight_smile: and added minting/coinage examples to complete the picture

[quote=“Cybnate, post:4, topic:1335”] I would still gain advantage in shortening the time to find POS block by 10 times, right?

The more coinage you have the better the chance you have to get a payout (minting new coins). Even if you don’t get a payout after 90 days your coinage is still accumulating (as far as I understand). Only the chance that you can actually mint coins doesn’t increase any further after 90 days.[/quote]

Thanks for the clear explanation. Most of it is FAQ material.

However you didn’t address the question above. From my understandings the process of minting POS blocks is just mining at the rate of 1 hash per second. Of course once you find a POS block all your coinage is consumed. The minging difficulty is proportional to the POS network difficulty and coin days in the kernel. That means the speed of finding a POS block is affected by not only the POS difficulty (which is the same to everyone), but also coinage you have. The more coinage you have, the less time it takes to find a POS block. What I was asking was that by having the same address in 10 wallets, would I find my POS block 10 times faster? The answer seems to be yes. It is just parallel POS block mining.
Being able to find a block faster is relevant to discussion here . There could be a small scale arms race in POS block miner if PPC is to have millions of POS owners who are interested in getting a POS block.

edit: fixed messy url

Sorry, it’s hard to keep track of all FAQ links, so my apologies if there are better FAQs.

Regarding your question, I didn’t answer.
Yes, you’re right and it is good, the more wallets(=nodes) the better for the network. Better distribution of blockchain, more resiliency etc.
I have posted in another thread about the fairness of the PoS system for smaller accounts (what you refer to as an arms race). This could be a way around it for them, although the power consumption might outweigh the benefits till you have really significant coinage.

Maybe there is profit to be made in a network with nodes for people with significant coinage, but relatively low stakes. Another way is to combine the stakes. Therefore you would need to solve the trust issue.

Edit: afterthought node network for hire

I meant that you said it so well that what you said should be put in an FAQ. There is no FAQ as far as I know explains the nature of POS mining as well as you did. I think you should cut and paste it to the wiki.

Ah, I clearly misunderstood. My apologies, english is my second language.

Yes, I’m happy to put it into a FAQ, but I don’t think I have access to change wiki or FAQs as I’m not part of the Peercoin team.
Will ask if they’re interested, thanks for suggestion.

For those who read this and also wonder, the answer is no. Approximately all 10 wallet will do exactly the same minting. The exception is that different wallet might see different transactions.