Bitcoins stuck in phone based wallet

1

So here is my situattion:

A while back I have purchased as and experiment some cloud mining, I ended up getting about $70 out of it. Anyway I use the official Android bitcoin app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.schildbach.wallet&hl=en

I have it backed up. And now when I try to restore it, the app just freezes at certain point. At the beginning it is 8 months behind, and as transactions start to appear in it, under each transaction there is alert basically saying that due to the fact that these transactions send to multiple addresses at once that app may become slow over time. And boy.. are they right. After it reaches certain point the transactions don't even show up anymore, and I can't seem to be able to send any bitcoins to some other adress before it is fully synced.

So my question is, can I maybe take the back up file and restore it to different wallet app (maybe one of the online based, or even some PC based one (Ubuntu)), as my guess is that my phone just can handle it (tried HTC ONE m7 and some shitty Sony Xperia). If so, how would I do it? Or all I can do is just keep on waiting? Or any other way to get my bitcoins out of that wallet, and just to forget about that wallet?

galdikas

Posted 2015-04-09T12:18:43.353

Reputation: 111

Does the app let you display or extract the private key? If so, maybe you can tell it to restore the wallet and then get the private key out before it become unresponsive. – David Schwartz – 2015-11-05T18:39:56.667

Answers

1

Actually, bitcoins are not IN a wallet. They are and will always be 'ON' the blockchain. The blockchain says how many bitcoins each address owns. Our devices merely save our private keys (you could say, our passwords) for us, since we can't really remember those very well.

If you can extract the private key from your wallet file, you can simply import the private key in pretty much every bitcoin wallet there is out there and claim the coins stored on the addresses.

(Keep your file(s) safe, because anyone with the private key can claim the coins and send them to another address you do not have the private key for!)

Mr Jones

Posted 2015-04-09T12:18:43.353

Reputation: 538

Yeah I understand that. I probably should of phrased my question how to unencrypt the wallet provided I know password (as the app handles all that), and then how to use the private key in other app. Anyway, i got most of the coins out eventually! – galdikas – 2015-04-09T15:55:48.040

Asked: 2015-04-09T12:18:43.353

Viewed: 401 times

Active: 2016-04-03T21:50:28.793