Dev Notes

Software Development Resources by David Egan.

Open Encrypted Bitcoin Core Wallet


Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency
David Egan

To decrypt a Bitcoin wallet in the bitcoin-cli, you need the walletpassphrase command. This article shows how to avoid leaving the password in your shell history.

These notes refer to Bitcoin core running on Ubuntu 16.04.

# Silently read password
read -s PASSWORD
# Enter password

# Open the wallet for 60 seconds
./bitcoin-cli walletpassphrase "${PASSWORD}" 60

# Do stuff - in this case, dump out a private key for a specified address
./bitcoin-cli dumpprivkey 12JZ2gDDRRLV9H5spbzygFok5VDd4jsWCV

# Lock Wallet when finished
./bitcoin-cli walletlock

# Empty the $PASSWORD variable
PASSWORD=
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