Manually extracting private keys for offline storage

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1

I’ve just set up my PPC wallet and I’d like to keep an offline copy of my addresses, wallet passphrase and private keys. The first two are easy, they’re right there in the PPC coin client, the private keys I have struggled with.

I know for bitcoin there are a few programs you can download to do this for you, I’m not sure if they work with PPC coin but I am also paranoid about having someone elses software extracting my private keys. I’ve searched google and peercointalk and I haven’t found a ‘how to’ guide for manually finding private keys to addresses.

The only guide I could find was on the peercoin subreddit, here: http://www.reddit.com/r/peercoin/comments/1rb8yd/omg_im_retarded_please_help_me_create_an_address/

Can anyone confirm JohnnyLatte’s guide is legitimate? With only 1 upvote to his post I don’t feel safe following his guide in case it damaged my wallet.

Thanks.

2

Yes I can confirm what he says is true, u just want to run ppcoind and the dumpprivatekey command
Fuzzybear

Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk 2

3

After some trouble I figured out what was going wrong and I thought I’d write a guide for less experienced users like myself.

With the Peercoin wallet already downloaded and installed this is how you manually get the private key of addresses in your wallet.

  1. Open notepad and copy and paste the following:

rpcuser=peer
rpcpassword=coin
server=1

*Pick a user and password yourself, for this guide we will be using peer and coin.

Click file and save as, in the address bar at the top type %appdata% and press enter then find the folder PPcoin, in the filename bar at the bottom type exactly “ppcoin.conf” - including the “” then click save and close notepad.

  1. OK now start up the peercoin wallet or if you already had it running, close it and start it up again.

Now go to where you installed peercoin, the default folder is C:\Program Files\PPCoin. In this folder you should see another folder called daemon. Hold shift on your keyboard and right click that folder, then find the option Open command window here and click it.

  1. Now you are in command prompt and you can find out your private keys.

First you have to type in the passphrase you used to encrypt your wallet - If you haven’t encrypted your wallet you can skip this step but make sure your encrypt your wallet when you are done.

*In this guide the passphrase I used to encrypt my wallet was cheese. So I would type in:

ppcoind walletpassphrase cheese 999 false

After this you should have a short delay and have no message sent back to you.

*Warning I had a long passphrase using numbers, letters and special characters and this caused some issues with this command, when I changed my passphrase to cheese it worked fine, so if you get an
error message try changing your passphrase temporarily to something small and simple.

Now the wallet has been unlocked and we can ask for our private key, in this guide my Peercoin address is PVr2ffo65cw5bLF7Pc4JRA4EAgbLPMEFde to get the private key for this address type in:

ppcoind dumpprivkey PVr2ffo65cw5bLF7Pc4JRA4EAgbLPMEFde

This time you should get a reply which gives you the private key for the address at the bottom, it is a very long alpha numeric key, you can now write this down so you have a hard copy in case something happens to your computer. Finally to lock your wallet again type in:

ppcoind walletlock

And don’t forget if you didn’t encrypt your wallet to go and do it and you probably want to keep a hard copy of that passphrase too.

This guide is a copy of JonnyLatte’s of reddit which is linked above, I have attempted to simplify it and warn you that having a long complex passphrase could cause some issues.

4

just put a “” symbol in front of any special characters. and proceed normally.