BitcoinTalk

Is safe running bitcoins with the same wallet on more computers simultaneously?

251
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BitcoinTalk
#1
From:
Aleš Janda
Subject:
Is safe running bitcoins with the same wallet on more computers simultaneously?
Date:
Hi,

I would like to use bitcoins but I'm using more than one computer. Can I use just one wallet on all computers (by copying settings)? Or it isn't possible?

What happened if someone send me money and bitcoin client run on more computers? What happened if I send money to anyone from one of clients? Will it be synchronized automatically?

Maybe it's a simple quetsion but I didn't find answer to this.
Thanks.
BitcoinTalk
#2
From:
BitLex
Subject:
Re: Is safe running bitcoins with the same wallet on more computers simultaneously?
Date:
i've never tried it myself and wouldn't recommend to,
in no way it's "safe", i guess it will cause some trouble sooner or later.

if you just want to use your wallet (spend/receive coins) on multiple machines, there's ways to make it portable (i guess, also not tried yet).

if you want to generate on multiple machines, that's possible by using a single client/wallet and multiple miners (GPU, CPU) running on the same, or multiple remote machines.
BitcoinTalk
#3
From:
FreeMoney
Subject:
Re: Is safe running bitcoins with the same wallet on more computers simultaneously?
Date:
I'm interested in hearing the problems with this. The current version generates a pool of 100 address, but are these used for receiving change? Maybe there could be an option for generating more than 100 addresses, and also for seeing how many you have left?

Is there some other type of problem I'm overlooking?
BitcoinTalk
#4
From:
BitLex
Subject:
Re: Is safe running bitcoins with the same wallet on more computers simultaneously?
Date:
the option to generate more addresses to the keypool already exists
Code:
# bitcoin.conf

# Pre-generate this many public/private key pairs, so wallet backups will be valid for
# both prior transactions and several dozen future transactions.
keypool=100

but as far as i understand, it's supposed to keep backups valid (for some time), not to sync multiple wallets.
i have no idea how that would work in the long term.
BitcoinTalk
#5
From:
satoshi
Subject:
Re: Is safe running bitcoins with the same wallet on more computers simultaneously?
Date:
Quote
Will it be synchronized automatically?
Very much not.  Using multiple copies of wallet.dat is not recommended or supported, in fact all of Bitcoin is designed to defeat that.  Both copies will get screwed up.

If you're trying to consolidate your generated coins into one wallet, a better solution now is to run getwork miners on the additional systems.  jgarzik has a CPU miner, and it supports tcatm's 4-way SSE2, so on Windows it's up to twice as fast as the built-in SHA if you have an AMD or recent Intel (core 3, 5 or 7).

New demonstration CPU miner available:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1925.0