Test Case: Successful Mint on Imported Stake!

I am making this post simply to affirm that Peerunity wallet successfully mints imported coins without losing coin-age. Actually, I had no theoretical objection to this possibility to begin with; however I always like to see things work out in practice!

Note: There is probably never a good reason for exporting/importing private keys from the wallet, so you should avoid the experiment described below unless you have a very specific need. There is risk of permanently losing access to your coins!

The reason I had for transferring private keys is that I wanted to run a second node that contained at least 1 transaction output capable of minting a POS block. Thus, I could not simply send the coins to the new wallet using a normal spend transaction because it would destroy all of the stored coin-age.

My solution was to export my “funded” private keys from my old wallet and then import them individually into two (or more) new wallets.

The steps for this are quite simple using the wallet console interface (Help > Debug Window > Console):

First you must unlock the wallet:

walletpassphrase "<Your Passphrase Here>" 60

The number 60 represents the time in seconds you would like the wallet to remain unlocked.

Next, export a specific private key:

dumpprivkey <Your Peercoin Public Address>

Here you must input the public address which points to the specific set of coins you would like to transfer. (This can be obtained by right-clicking on a corresponding wallet transaction and selecting “Copy Address”)

The console will now display the Base58Check encoding of your private key. Copy this to the clipboard and proceed to the next step.

Now open the console in your new wallet and type:

importprivkey <Your Private Key From Clipboard>

Note: This step assumes that you are importing into a fresh wallet which has not yet been encrypted. If it has, you will need to perform the walletpasshrase command first as done previously in the old wallet.

At this point, both the old and new wallets will contain (and attempt to mint) the same exact stake of coins - WHICH PROVIDES NO SIGNIFICANT ADVANTAGES compared to minting in a single stable wallet. To avoid this duplication, you should now securely delete the old wallet after making sure that all of the coins have successfully been imported into new wallets. It is important to be sure that you securely delete the old wallet and/or protect it the same as you would any active wallets because someone who obtains it and your passphrase later will be able to spend your coins!

So, getting back the original purpose: If you follow these steps successfully, I can now verify that you will be able to divide your Peercoin holdings into multiple wallets and successfully mint $$ ;D $$ without losing any respective coin-age. However, as noted above, there is arguably no reason to ever actually do this.

Good that answers my question with an example.

btw Import/exportprivkey is useful before coincontrol was implemented. You can chose which address to spend using them.