Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
You can back up your wallet file, but you should store it on any two USB
flash drives or CDs, and store it in a safety deposit box at home or in the
bank. You should never be tempted to copy your wallet to any kind of
online storage or backup services, especially if it's unencrypted.
Creating a Bitcoin address
These examples will work with the command line, as you can re-use them to
display data on your web server. All online wallets use the Bitcoind API to generate
addresses and manage your wallet. As a word of warning, you should never use
online wallet services as almost all of them have been hacked, resulting in massive
numbers of coins getting stolen.
You can download the Bitcoin-QT client and run it in X if you prefer an
easy way to manage your wallet.
The following command lines will create a new receiving address and then list all
your addresses:
bitcoind getnewaddress
bitcoind listaccounts
Receiving Bitcoins
As long as you know your address, people can send you Bitcoins. You do not need to
have Bitcoind running all the time as the transactions are processes and are stored in
the network. It is just very important to keep a backup of your
wallet.dat
file if you
want to send the Bitcoins somewhere else, like an online exchange.
Sending Bitcoins
As long as you have coins in your wallet, you can easily send coins to another
address by using the
sendtoaddress
command followed by the address and the
amount. Here is an example sending 0.01 Bitcoins to the author's tip jar:
bitcoind sendtoaddress 126HA8L1dP7fr7ECu2oEMtz6JpDRnzqp9N 0.01
You will get a response, which is a transaction ID. If you do not, the transaction
has failed. You need to have at least 0.0001 Bitcoins reserved for the transaction
fees. If you are sending large amounts of coins, this transaction fee will also
become more expensive.
