In an online course the instructor told us that anyone can find the private key of a wallet by using dumpprivkey(address), address being the address that is created from the key (which is public in a transaction on the bitcoin chain).He said that this command returns a WIF object. I assume that is not true because then anyone would steal anyone's bitcoin by looking up the addresses in tx's on the cahin and running the command. Can someone enlighten me about this dumpprivkey command please ?
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I hope he meant that they can get the private key for any address in their wallet. Obviously, the software cannot dump a key it does not have.
David Schwartz
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So, this command needs wallet and the address to operate right. Correct? – Efe Dec 13 '19 at 19:41
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2The wallet needs to be unlocked, the key needs to be in the wallet, and you need to specify the address whose key you want. – David Schwartz Dec 13 '19 at 19:44